Definition
The Ideology Moderate Score predicts how likely a person is to identify as politically moderate.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following survey question:
Which of the following labels best describes your current political ideology?
- Liberal
- Moderate
- Conservative
The ideology Moderate score was trained on polling data from the Summer 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 7,721 responses online from registered voters in July and August 2025. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Three separate classifications models were built to predict the likelihood of an individual responding liberal, moderate, or conservative ideology. After model predictions were made, scores were normalized so that for each individual, the sum of their liberal, moderate, and conservative scores is 100.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 1,524 polling respondents (20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Ideology Moderate Score, 59% are actually moderate making them 33% more likely to report that they are moderate than the average voter. At the other end of the distribution, individuals in the bottom 20% of the Ideology Moderate Score are 28% less likely than average to have a moderate ideology.
The model achieved a test set AUC of 0.61, indicating useful discriminative ability in identifying moderate voters. While this AUC is at the lower end of predictive ability relative to most of the other models we publish (including the Ideology Liberal Score and Ideology Conservative Score), this is not surprising, given that predicting who is moderate is a notoriously challenging problem - moderates represent a more diverse group, who often share characteristics with both liberals and conservatives.
Use Cases
The Ideology Moderate Score can be used in a variety of ways when building a campaign strategy and planning voter engagement. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other scores. Below are a few examples for how partners could use this score:
- Primary Election Targeting: In heavily Democratic or Republican geographies where the primary winner often becomes the de facto general election winner, this score helps identify voters aligned with moderate candidates. For example, in a Democratic primary with a progressive candidate and a moderate candidate, partners supporting the moderate candidate can combine high Ideology Moderate Scores (scores of 55 and above) with high Partisan Scores (scores of 80 and above) to target voters most likely to support their candidate. This is particularly valuable when issue scores don't differentiate candidates within a target universe (e.g., when the vast majority of Democrats within a location support reproductive rights and gun control).
- Building Broad Coalitions: Partners working to build coalitions that span the political spectrum can use this score to identify moderate voters who may serve as bridges between liberal and conservative constituencies. By filtering for voters with high Ideology Moderate Scores (scores of 55 and above), partners can focus their coalition-building efforts on individuals most likely to find common ground across ideological divides. This approach is particularly valuable for nonpartisan issues or campaigns that require support from across the political spectrum.
- Within-Party Voter Education: In areas dominated by one party, partners can use this score alongside the Ideology Liberal or Ideology Conservative scores to segment voters by ideology. For example, when advocating for policies that require moderate support, partners can identify high Ideology Moderate Score voters (those with scores of 55 and above) for targeted outreach, while developing different messaging strategies for more ideologically committed voters (those with Ideology Moderate Scores below 55). This allows for more nuanced communication that meets voters where they are ideologically.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Ideology Moderate Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 60 |
| 20% | 55 |
| 30% | 52 |
| 40% | 49 |
| 50% | 47 |
| 60% | 45 |
| 70% | 42 |
| 80% | 38 |
| 90% | 33 |
| 100% | 17 |