It turns out that the American political center is occupied by a purple-colored straw man, according to a well-designed and numbers-heavy report from Esquire magazine and NBC News. It’s a report that tried its damnedest to find a centrist majority in the United States, and, thanks to some clever categorizing, succeeded. …
The real question, the question on which literally everything else hinges, is what comprises the groups that are squeezed into the center. “What we found,” the report reads, “is very surprising: Not only is the center not shrinking, but it is growing, and now actually constitutes approximately 51 percent of the electorate, spanning the full range of income and geography.” All of the graphs and data and reporting swirls around this idea that just over half of America is part of this beautiful purple mountain’s majesty. But why these four slices of the eight-slice pie are in the center is far from clear. [cont.]
Philip Bump, The Atlantic Wire