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Most moderates lean more strongly to one side or the other. It doesn't have to be a specific number of points one way or the other just the majority.

If I am mostly Center left by far left standards and left standards in a few decades . Just because my views on a few issues like guns, wokeness, child labor etc don't match what is considered the left view, doesn't mean I do not lean MORE left than I do right.

If I more commonly agree with one side than the other, I am left/left leaning. Being moderately left vs extremely left isn't as vital as identifying as "left" overall.

People refer to left or right like they are referring to the major things of ideologies of the parties. When someone refers to someone as a "leftist" generally it implies pro-choice, pro-gay rights, in favor of more gun laws, supporting specific social issues/movements , universal healthcare/healthcare reform, etc.

They point to the major talking points of the parties, not the more nuanced points I have like being against public holidays, being against kids being exposed to drag queens, me saying women don’t have prostates, me supporting the C Kennedy v Bremerton result, etc

Again, it isn't a set number of points on one side or the other. It is about whether or not I mostly agree with the right or left talking points. I agree more with the left, so I am left , Left Center, Center Left 

Bringing up an issue that isn't a party/sided talking point doesn't seem logical. Like, a law referring to the legality of a veterinarian carrying drugs in their vehicle isn't truly a left/right issue; because there is no party stance, my stance on it doesn't change if I am left or right leaning.

But how many points do you need before you move me to Center left, moderate, right?

In the Sorites paradox you take 1 grain of sand away from a pile of sand, asking when it end being a pile. You can endlessly ask questions such as when night turns into day and so on, but in the end, you know intuitively that despite there being an exact moment things change from completely one thing to completely another, those two things exist and there are even words to define the middle points too

In the US we aren’t a direct democracy, we elect representatives. If we vote for candidate X because of their stance on one issue, we are also giving them taciturn approval for all their other stances. That’s pretty much how it’s work.So we need to move to a direct democracy to fix this and to abolish the political spectrum

If someone voted for a Strasserite for their economic policy, then the obvious implication is that their preference for his/her economic policy out weighed their abhorent violent views on Jewish people, hence the compromise was OK with the voter in question.

There has to be a political party stance in order for someone to lean left or right on a topic

Who cares?

In America, nuanced policy positions matter in primary elections and that’s it. After that, your personal positions make no difference to national policy. Are you a “compassionate conservative” who really does wish that our immigration system were overhauled to provide a better path for refugees and other immigrants? Well, if you’re also a strict anti-abortion advocate, or you don’t support increased corporate taxes, or you won’t even consider increased gun control, to the point where no matter who wins the Republican primary you’ll be voting for them…your vote has exactly the same impact on American policy as a literal “Blood and Soil” Nazi.

I don’t really care what you truly believe. I don’t really care what our politicians truly believe. I don’t care how many Democrats are actually pro-gay rights or if they just are responding to the political winds of their constituents. All I truly care about is what makes it into law, or some other government policy like an executive order. That’s all that matters. From that perspective, if you’re so invested in one portion of a party’s platform that you’re willing to overlook human rights abuses, then you’re morally just as culpable for those human rights abuses as the people who are actively in favor of them.

That’s not what “straw man” means.

I neither believe nor said that all people in any party (didn’t just say opponents either…) literally believe the same thing. What I said was that if how you vote in the general election has little to no relation to the winning policy positions in the primary of your favored party (and the positions of the opposing party represent a significant departure; let’s not pretend that every Democratic voter voted for Biden or Obama’s wars, because both political parties are in favor of war…) then you are at least tacitly saying “the polic(ies) I care about trumps (heh) anything that I might disagree with that this party is doing.”

What that says about you as an individual is not my problem. If economic, religious, or gun rights policies are more important to you than human rights, own that.

Lastly: this has nothing to do with how politicians see people. I’m talking about how us normal folk talk and think. We don’t wield the levers of power, so for us, voting is really all we can do most of the time to exert any kind of influence. Politicians and anyone with a platform can direct policy and influence public opinion all the time. They therefore should have a more nuanced opinion of and dialog with the issues

You’re trying to oversimplify this in order to have a convenient understanding of it, but it’s not simple or convenient. It would be meaningless to try to identify someone who agreed with 100% of right or leftwing policies; there’s no such thing because there is no consensus. Even the most extreme members of each party disagree on a number of issues.

It’s a matter of aesthetics—some things are too complex to fully explain. If I asked you to tell me about a painting you could tell me about the subject and tone and palette and brushstrokes but I’d still never in a million years be able to actually imagine the painting without having seen it myself. Still, it’s helpful if you can tell me whether the colors are more warm or cool so I can decide if I want to hang it in my living room. they vote republican down the line?

Yeah, they are a reliable republican voter. That's how the party apparatus sees them, anyway.

believes everything the repub believes

Yes and no - "they just don't care enough NOT to vote against them"

Lets say GOP says "I will lower your taxes and I will ban homosexuality" - if you vote for them, you are basically saying "I don't care enough to NOTE vote against the banning of homosexuality."

It's effectively the same end result.

The Republican Party supports expanded gun rights,

Right, that’s why In the last twelve years, the Republican president was the only one to pass anti gun laws...

o you propose to replace it with?

Yeah, there are issues with it--it leads to people putting Joseph Stalin and Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders all on the same "side" and therefore assuming they all have the same beliefs.

But there's a reason we use it. We need a way of describing someone's politics in a more vague way. A large government will have thousands of politicians involved and nobody can reasonably expect to know the nuances of every individual politician's beliefs. It's just not possible.

To even begin to understand political movements, we need to be able to group them somehow, so we can talk about larger trends without having to have an intimate understanding of every political movement that has ever happened. There are more groups than just "left" and "right" --we talk about communists, socialists, anarchists, centrists, liberals, conservatives, the alt right, fascists, etc. These terms don't convey every nuance of every individual belief but they're not intended to. I don't need nor want to know the full complexities of every political candidate's beliefs before I decide who to vote for. I want to know which policies they'll support. Putting them in some broader category gives me a pretty good idea.

It's not an issue with the terms "left" and "right" that people don't use them consistently. That's just language. No matter what you replaced them with, the same thing would happen. There's no one "correct definition" so everyone's definition will always be different to reflect their own ideology. Everyone thinks of themselves as being the reasonable one and puts others who disagree into some different category.

The problem you have with these labels isn't caused by the labels, it's caused by all language being a bit vague and messy. This will always happen no matter what labels you use. There is no "correct answer" to which ideology and individual has and there never will be no matter what ideology you use, it will always depend on the beliefs of the person describing them.

The problem mostly goes away if you lay this out upfront. Say "when I say 'liberals' I mean people who believe this". Now anyone who's arguing in good faith knows what you mean even if they wouldn't define the term the same way. The problems occur when Person A thinks "leftist" means "someone opposed to capitalism" and Person B thinks it means "people who vote for the American Democratic party" and neither of them realises they're not using them the same way. The solution isn't replacing the terms, it's encouraging people to be more clear in their arguments.

Not label people? Isn't that reductive? Believe in what? I've seen people argue what 'conservative' means. Even someone who labels themselves 'conservative'. Some are like 'conservatives don't have a problem with you being gay'. and some argue yes, definitionally, not having a problem with gays makes you liberal. It's strange, and that's one of the reasons I can't get on board with the 'this is what a conservative/liberal' is

If you can't talk about policies without talking about people, I wouldn't want a political discussion with you anyways. I can talk about pro gun policies without talking about the person supporting it is a cross dressing alien dragon.

The point is that the world isn't fair, and you don't get a say about policies at all. You only get a little bit of say about people. And that's why people talk about which people you associate with, not what policies you stand for, because the latter is irrelevant if you aren't a politician yourself and you associate with a politician that disagrees with you on policy despite that