Moderation in some things

I saw an article by Matthew Yglesias which noted that in 2016 quite a few voters said that Donald Trump was a moderate, or even a liberal.   Only 47% said he was a conservative, compared to 60% for Mitt Romney in 2012 and 62% for John McCain in 2008.  Yglesias suggested that this was because of Trump's positions on economic issues:  he  "campaigned on protectionist rhetoric that voters are more accustomed to hearing from Democrats, promised a large increase in infrastructure spending, abandoned traditional Republican commitments to cut Social Security and Medicare expenditures, and even made ambiguous promises to create a universal health care system."  This doesn't seem that plausible to me--protectionism isn't really an issue that divides the parties, and commitments to Social Security and Medicare and vague promises to see that everyone gets health care coverage are standard for anyone who wants to get elected.  Trump did sound different from most Republicans on infrastructure, but that was only one issue, and I'm not sure that he emphasized it that much--he mentioned it only twice on Twitter in 2016, and one of those was a retweet from Newt Gingrich "Trump shows courage in defending eminent domain as a necessity for construction of infrastructure."  In October 2016, he summarized his economic plan as "eliminate excessive regulations, lean government, lower taxes," just like any other Republican would have done. 
    In my view, people were more likely to be thinking of "social issues"--Trump didn't give the impression that he cared much about things like abortion, same sex marriage, or prayer in the schools.  Moreover, apart from his position on the issues, some people seem to think of "liberal" in terms of lifestyle and personal morals rather than politics. 
   I looked for questions that might show which interpretation was correct, but didn't find anything.  However, I ran across a survey from July 2015, a few weeks after Trump announced his candidacy but before the first debate.  It asked people who said that they were Republican or leaned Republican, "do you think that _____ views on most issues are too liberal for you, too conservative for you, or just about right" for Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker.  The results

                     Too Liberal      Too Conservative    Just Right          DK
Bush                  24%                13%                           46%             17%
Trump               16%                17%                            45%             21%
Cruz                    9%                19%                            37%             35%
Walker                7%                 11%                            41%             42%
Rubio                13%                 11%                            45%             32%

One interesting point is that Republican voters didn't see Trump as particularly liberal.  In terms of perception, Bush was on the left, Cruz on the right, and the other three in the middle, with about equal numbers rating them as too liberal and too conservative.   That makes sense for Cruz, but I'm not sure why that many people saw Bush as too liberal.  Maybe it was just an association with other Bushes, and maybe it was a general sense that he was "establishment."  The other interesting thing is that the share of "don't knows" was substantially lower for Trump than for Walker, Rubio, and Cruz.  That seemed strange to me at first, until I recalled that Trump had apparently done a lot of appearances discussing politics on cable TV.  That meant he was a familiar figure to many people, not just as an entertainer, but as a political figure, although he got a lot less attention than Cruz, Walker, or Rubio in "serious" news.  That familiarity probably helped him to get to the front of the pack. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]