Comment by YZF
I think the claim is that a lot of people stick with the tribe regardless of how closely it matches their world views. It might be dismissive but it resonates. I've seen people keep voting for the same parties even when the policies have shifted very significantly.
Since you are left leaning, presumably American, a good example is the Republicans. The current policies and values of the Republicans seem to be very different than let's say those of 20 years ago. But you don't see a lot of movement, i.e. you don't really see people saying because your actions of policies changed I'm going to re-evaluate my support for you. Maybe the other team is now closer to my world views. It's a lot more common that people just keep voting for their camp or team. I'm sure there are studies, this is very anecdotal. There are also many e.g. single issue voters, they only care about a single issue and nothing else.
Independent thinkers, who dive deep into issues, who challenge beliefs, who weigh multiple issues and considerations, who potentially shift their position when the goal posts have moved or they've evaluated new information, are rare. It's much easier to stay in an echo chamber/team/tribe. We see this all the time, another example is the pandemic. It's lack of nuance.
You see this in the political discourse. Instead of debating things of substance it's more of a rally around the team approach. You're never going to see in-depth discussion/analysis on tax policies, or security policies. Anything that doesn't meet your world view is automatically discredited whether it has merit or not, It's going to be they bad we good/polarizing/conspiracies etc. This pushes people farther apart and I think it also pushes policies farther apart. Maybe sometimes it is that simple but plenty of times it's not.
A lot of this is due to the failure of the American political system: there is simply no room for a third party. A lot of people don't want to vote for "their" party, it's merely a strategic vote in an attempt to keep the worse of two evil out of power.
If you vote for a third-party candidate, you might just as well not have voted at all. The parties will only genuinely start caring about policy when that gets fixed, and voters will only start looking into politics when there is more than one option on their side of the aisle.