Liberal, conservative, or neither?

“Am I liberal or conservative?” is one of the most common questions people bring to a political quiz. For a lot of Americans the honest answer is: it depends on the subject. Here is what the best surveys say about the labels people choose, and about the views underneath them.

What Americans call themselves

When Gallup asks Americans to describe their political views, the answers split three ways. In 2025, 35% called themselves conservative or very conservative, 33% moderate, and 28% liberal or very liberal. Conservatives still outnumber liberals, but the seven-point gap is the smallest in Gallup’s annual averages going back to 1992. Back then, 17% called themselves liberal and 43% moderate.

The labels track party, but not perfectly. In 2025, 77% of Republicans called themselves conservative and 59% of Democrats called themselves liberal. Independents were the most mixed: 47% moderate, 27% conservative and 24% liberal.

A label isn’t a whole outlook

Ask about one area at a time and the picture shifts. In a 2024 survey, Gallup asked separately about social and economic issues. On social issues, Americans split almost evenly: 32% conservative, 32% moderate and 33% liberal. On economic issues they leaned the other way: 39% conservative, 35% moderate and 23% liberal. Among Democrats, 44% called themselves moderate on economics, against 24% on social issues.

Party and ideology don’t always line up either. Among registered voters in 2023, Pew Research Center found that a quarter associated with the Democratic Party while describing their views as conservative or moderate, and 14% were Republicans or Republican leaners who called themselves moderate or liberal.

Most people hold a mix of views

Labels are what people call themselves. Pew has also measured what they actually think, using ten questions about values, from the size of government to immigration and the environment. Each answer leans liberal or conservative.

• In 2017, 32% of Americans took a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions. That share has shrunk: it was 49% in 1994 and 2004.
• The share with consistently liberal or consistently conservative views was 23% in 2015: 13% consistently liberal and 10% consistently conservative.
• In 2017 the median American took four conservative and six liberal positions on these questions. In 2011, 2014 and 2015 the median was an even five and five.

Pew’s newest look, the 2026 Political Typology, sorts Americans into nine groups by their values. Four are highly ideological and partisan, and together they make up 38% of adults. Most Americans, Pew writes, “fall into groups within a large, politically messy center.” It adds that “most Americans – in both partisan coalitions – are neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative in their values.” About 15% of Republicans and Republican leaners hold values that place them left of center overall, and a similar share of Democrats hold values that place them right of center.

Moderate isn’t the same as mixed

Calling yourself moderate and holding mixed views are different things. A 2023 study in the American Political Science Review, using survey answers from more than 285,000 Americans, found that a single left-to-right line describes the policy views of about 73% of people, many of them genuine moderates who sit in the middle on most issues. But about one in five Americans, 20.7% by the authors’ estimate, hold views that no single left-right line describes well.

Two directions at once

One reason a single line falls short is that views on the economy and views on social and cultural questions can point in different directions. After the 2016 election, political scientist Lee Drutman placed 8,000 Americans on both at once for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. Among 2016 voters he found:

• Liberals, 44.6%: liberal on both economic and identity issues.
• Conservatives, 22.7%: conservative on both.
• Populists, 28.9%: liberal on economic issues, conservative on identity issues.
• Libertarians, 3.8%: conservative on economics, liberal on identity issues.

Nearly a third of voters, in other words, sat on opposite sides of the line depending on the question. Drutman concluded that conflict over national identity, race and morality had come to divide the parties more than economics did.

So which are you?

If one word has never quite fit, the problem may be the scale, not you. A better question is two questions: where do you stand on the economy, and where do you stand on society?

That’s how the nine types on We the Panel work. The quiz places you on an economic scale, from shared responsibility to self-reliance, and a social one, from change to tradition. Three positions on each give nine types, from the Reformer to the Traditionalist, with plenty of room for the Protector, who wants an economy on workers’ side and holds traditional values, or the Free Agent, who wants free markets and free lives. It never tells you how to vote.

For more on why so many people feel unrepresented, see Politically homeless? You’re not alone.