A solid majority(53%) of American registered voters sees the Democrats as more liberal than themselves and a strong plurality (41%) see the Republicans as more conservative. But a whopping 27% see the Republicans as more liberal than themselves!

There’s some debate as to how people perceive the terms “liberal” and “conservative” and whether they mean the same thing to most people. Regardless, Americans have aligned themselves with the term “conservative” at a much higher rate for decades. And they think the Republican Party is also “conservative” while the Democratic Party is “liberal.” So, if we’re defining “centrist” as the median ideology of America at any given moment in time, the Republicans are much closer to it than Democrats.