So what does it mean to be moderate in 2018? Members came up with characterizations to help clarify who a centrist is. Below are a few, drawn from members’ forum posts with permission.

The compromising centrist

One self-described centrist hopes for compromise “through divided government.” He has voted Republican and Democrat in the past, and plans to vote Democrat in the midterms in order to break the Republican majority and balance the House. “I would like to believe in a Jurgen Habermas–like vigorous contest of ideas that leads to an acceptable solution, hopefully the best solution, to shared problems in the pursuit of common goals.” Habermas, a German cultural theorist, argues that the best communication aims to understand rather than gain.

But the prominence of social issues in today’s political environment makes that kind of compromise more challenging. Consider the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, in which the Supreme Court recently allowed a bakery to refuse service to a gay couple. An issue like that is designed to force voters to choose between competing values, in this case religious liberty and civil rights. “How does one compromise on cultural issues, especially when they are explicitly based on belief?” David asked.

The apathetic centrist

Centrism can also signify a failure to closely engage with vital national issues. On this view, centrists have more quotidian concerns: “They want good schools for their kids, homes they can afford, good neighborhoods to live in; they don’t want to pay too much taxes or pay too much for goods and services,” wrote a member who goes by Jazzaloha. “I don’t think they care so much about how that’s achieved.”

Centrists are in the middle, Donna said, because they’re not only uncommitted, but also generally inattentive. “The remaining latent voters are only persuadable at the end of the general campaign cycle, because it is only then that they start to pay attention.” Research by FiveThirtyEight has shown that uncommitted voters broke last minute toward Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Donna posited that apathetic centrists’ decisions are largely binary and based on how they feel about the status quo: Is it bad? Then vote for change.

In studies, the Pew Research Center has found that the more partisan someone is, the more politically active she is. The reverse may be true, as well. A centrist, in this telling, is someone too apathetic to vote.

The ambivalent centrist

The political scientist James Stimson argues that ambivalent, or weakly opinionated, individuals make up a huge part of the American electorate. These voters are genuinely on the fence and potentially drawn to the policies of both parties. Cindy defines those weakly opinionated voters as centrists. “They are highly influenced by facts,” she said, echoing Stimson, “as long as those facts are repeatedly and clearly communicated throughout the election cycle.” Unaffiliated with either party, they can often be persuaded by information, true or not, about a strong candidate or policy.