As I understand, the Democrats in general overvalue the median voter hypothesis, according to which moving to the middle is generally the winning move. They've got the graphs to prove it.
As I've heard it explained, the median voter hypothesis only really applies when voters generally don't actually care about an issue. When there's a real political crisis, when polarization is real, then the median voter hypothesis doesn't apply.
A few years ago, I was seeing the expression, "the extreme center", referring to how aggressively the Democrats were purging anyone or anything that questioned centrism. It did get pretty intensely weird around 2015-16, with liberals flagging fascists and anti-fascists, TERFs and trans rights activists, all as Russian psy-ops.
