When Pajamas Media was just forming, a fair number of bloggers were uncomfortable with the conventional left-right, liberal-conservative dichotomized pigeonholes of the mainstream media.

We wondered how others felt, so in the fall of 2005 we looked for research on this area. Not being able to find any, we commissioned in October 2005, a poll with Princeton Research. Question 21 of that poll asked if the respondents felt that the labels of liberal or conservative applied to them. Not entirely to our surprise, those respondents did not reflect a minority view, but actually a plurality of the American public. 43% of those responding felt that neither the liberal nor conservative label totally applied to them, a percentage vastly greater than those who identified with either polarity.

But we also found these people aren’t actually centrists in the conventional sense of that word. They have passionate feelings from all sides of the spectrum, not just the middle ground. Someone could be a complete social liberal while being an adamant war hawk. Or the reverse. In other words — these people are “blends” with some values from the liberal side and other values from the conservative side. They are not 100% partisans that are glued to a typical ideology. Thanks to an excellent submission from one of our readers, we have dubbed this group the “Freerangers”.

This October 2005 research however seems even more relevant in the fall of 2006. This is a time when some media, political and even blogger camps focus on 100% partisan purity. We want Politics Central to be an environment for a broad range of ideologies including the unserved Freerangers. We see that there can be Freerange voters, Freerange politicians and Freerange media (like Politics Central).

Freeranger Central is the area where we examine this phenomenon with research and analysis.

Pajamas not to scale.

Yes, polls are closed and results tabulated on Pajamas Medias’ great search to find a name for the more than 40% of Americans not comfortable with being labeled “liberal,” “conservative” or even “moderate.”