He was the epitome of a "radical centrist" when he was the straight-talk express John McCain.
Even among those that missed their ideology, most were off just a bit (thinking they were conservative when they were actually libertarian, or thought they were centrist when they were really liberal).
The shadow Defence Secretary will need to be braced for a backlash from centrist MPs when the issue comes to a head next year.
In its recent Election '08 issue, The Nation magazine offers this assessment, "Hillary Clinton has proven herself a dedicated centrist and when the center moves left, she has shown she can move too".
And they are centrists when it comes to the role of the state, wanting to see basic safety nets preserved, from Social Security for the old to Medicaid for the poor.
When the centrist Progress Party and the rightwing Independence Party came to power in 2013 they suspended the talks with Brussels.
This backfired, badly, when the centrist Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, promised instead to goose the economy with a few years of modest deficit spending on infrastructure, a position more consonant with mainstream public opinion on the left and in the centre.
He was given a further boost when the centrist François Bayrou, who took 9% of the vote in the first round, broke with his party's tradition and said he would vote for him.
British Conservatives, nevertheless, seem obsessed with the financial "magic" of Martin because he introduced the biggest reduction in government spending in Canada's history when the centrist Liberals swept to power in 1993.
Ethnic-Russian voters (around half have Latvian citizenship, either by birth or naturalisation) were incensed by the election result last year, when the centrist parties of the prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis and the ex-president Valdis Zatlers shunned a coalition with the main pro-Russian party (and election winner) Harmony Centre.
