By some measures, around half of the population is either disengaged or has ideologically inconsistent views. Together, 54 percent of Americans either hold a roughly equal mix of conservative and liberal positions or say they don’t follow the news most of the time, according to an Upshot analysis of 2017 data from Pew Research.

People in this moderate middle are less ideologically rigid than their politically aroused compatriots. They may lean left or right or hold strong views about the president — 65 percent of these less engaged voters say they either strongly approve or disapprove of his performance. But they do not line up on every single issue with progressives or conservatives, and for many, politics is not part of their everyday lives. Many want to find compromise and shrink from the conflict that modern politics has come to mean.

“We are just not seeing the polarization among the masses that people imagine,” said Sam Abrams, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who surveyed a nationally representative sample of Americans with NORC at the University of Chicago last year. “People who watch MSNBC and Fox are a loud but small minority. They are not representative of most Americans.”