No middle. There are only individual issues and ideological frameworks. If you don’t have a position or an ideological framework, it means you either aren’t interested, or aren’t knowledgeable. If you aren’t knowledgeable, you’re either a dilettante you don’t really care enough to do the work to educate yourself.
Part of the problem is this notion of a spectrum between left and right. Really, people points of view stretch out all over the place. Not just left and right, but up and down and forward and back and probably into a few other dimensions as well. If you used statistical techniques, you might be able to find a line that fits, but that’s just a fiction, as well. It is impossible to interpret.
We have to understand each other on an issue by issue; question by question basis. We have to avoid generalizations, if we really want to understand each other.
In fact, I don’t really want to understand others, and I don’t think many people really do. It’s much more fun to make generalizations and cast aspersions and that sort of thing. Makes for livelier arguments. And it doesn’t hurt anything, because coming to “understanding” really won’t help us at all.
Political opinions are a game. What we say matters only slightly marginally in that we might persuade someone to change their vote, but that will happen very rarely, if ever.
There may be people who identify themselves as in the middle or undecided. I can’t imagine that. I don’t know what they have been thinking about. Probably nothing. They probably wait until the last minute to decide. Just because it makes them feel important. I suspect that if they were honest with themselves, they know who they’d vote for, but it just isn’t fun to make a decision right now.