Why do "Centrists" always seem to favor conservatives, rather than progressives?

[JHan]

45. This was a terrible essay. And centrism is not the reason that Bannon was invited.

Facilitating Trump and his voter base is why that happened.

making excuses for Trump and his voter base is why that happened. And this is prevalent on the far left as well - see Ted Rall.

The author is bashing centrists without tackling Centrism itself - what it is, who defines themselves as such, etc. This is intellectual laziness.

All we get are "Centrists are bad people y'all"

But I'll treat your post with good faith and not dismiss your op since "Centrists" get bashed here so often.

Beliefs exist on a wide spectrum. They may lean moderate on some things, swerve more left/right on others. Lakoff calls them (Centrists) "bi-conceptuals" You may find they apply their "liberal" or "conservative" beliefs inconsistently. Their beliefs do not follow a clear straight line, they don't fall neatly into our unidimensional categories such as Libertarians, or leftists who are socially conservative but economically liberal, or socially liberal but believe in protectionism etc etc etc etc

Different sorts of people identify as "centrists" so you will find even within a group of self-identifying "centrists" a wide diversity in ideology and how they characterize their politics.

Sometimes views exist in a continuum and change with new information or changing circumstances.

And there are some who call themselves centrists when they are actually low information - they haven't got enough information to form a definitive position on an issue.

From "The Nature of Political Ideology in the Contemporary Electorate,"

"If ideological preferences are multidimensional, it means that responses to the unidimensional ideology question, especially the moderate and DK ( don't know) categories,likely capture not only those who are centrist but also those who are cross-pressured between policy domains. For someone with a liberal position on one policy dimension and a conservative one on another, the "liberal" and "conservative" labels are simply inadequate descriptors of political beliefs. As such, when asked their political ideology on a one-dimensional scale, these individuals should be more likely to say DK or to select the middle category.

The finding that the moderate label masks differences between policy centrists and cross-pressured respondents has consequences for our theories and models of political behavior…

There is a clear tendency for scholars and journalists to treat political moderates as a homogeneous group, painting broad strokes about their attitudes and behavior. Yet, our analysis documents important heterogeneity in the policy preferences of moderates that could well influence conclusions about their voting behavior.

If you’re measuring people on a liberal-moderate-conservative spectrum, these people will be captured as moderates even though they may hold beliefs which are quite radical about particular issues, simply because their views aren’t consistently radical. And these inconsistently radical voters don’t just exist in theory either, but are quite common.

...Ezra Klein: No One’s Less Moderate Than the Moderates

…moderates are largely a statistical myth. When you dig into their policy positions, the people who show up as moderates in polls are actually pretty damn extreme…

What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they’re left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they’re labeled as moderate.

But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are well out of the political mainstream. “A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British,” Broockman said in July 2014. “A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process. You’ll often see really draconian measures towards gays and lesbians get 16 to 20 percent support. These people look like moderates but they’re actually quite extreme.”…

Digging into a 134-issue survey, Broockman and coauthor Doug Ahler found that 70.1 percent of all respondents, and 71.3 percent of self-identified moderates, took at least one position outside the political mainstream. Moderates, in other words, are just as likely as anyone else to hold extreme positions: it’s just that those positions don’t all line up on the left or the right…

There’s even reason to believe “average voters” — which is to say, less politically engaged voters — hold more extreme opinions: engaged Democrats and Republicans tend to adopt the positions held by their parties, and parties tend to adopt positions that are popular, achievable and workable. So voters who follow their parties end up pushing ideas in the political mainstream. Voters who aren’t as interested in politics and who don’t attach themselves to a party push the ideas they actually like, irrespective of whether they’re popular or could attract 60 votes in the Senate or would be laughed at by policy experts.

The other problem is that the term “moderate” makes it sound like there’s one kind of moderate — which is where the idea emerges that there’s some silent moderate majority out there waiting for their chance to take back politics. But someone who believes in punitively taxing the rich and criminalizing homosexuality is not going to form a coalition with someone who believes in low taxes and gay marriage, even though both of these voters would look moderate on a survey.

The deeper point here is that the idea of the moderate middle is bullshit: it’s a rhetorical device meant to marginalize some policy positions at the expense of others. There’s no actual way to measure it, or consistent definition animating it, and it doesn’t spontaneously emerge in any of the data