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Apprentice comments on A Voting Puzzle, Some Political Science, and a Nerd Failure Mode - Less Wrong
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The problem of not realizing the existence of vast numbers of people "whose views you would find even more repugnant" seems to be very general. Progressive activists tend to see elected Democratic leaders as hopelessly timid, watered-down centrist sellouts while they see elected Republicans as ruthlessly efficient hard-right zealots, beholden to the most extreme elements of their party. And conservative activists have a very similar view of their own leaders as centrist sellouts while they see Democratic leaders as hard-left fanatics.
I'm not sure why this is so but part of the reason probably is the general tendency to have a more nuanced understanding of stuff which is close to oneself. So the difference between various flavors of your own ideology are salient to you while the differences between various flavors of the evil opposing ideology are not. In the same mundane way that the differences between Florida and Ohio may be more salient to you than the differences between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
It's worth explicitly noting that both liberal and conservative activists are right about their own leaders being centrist sellouts, just barely worth voting for. This is the natural order of things, as admirably explained by Chris in his post. The part they are wrong about is in not seeing the difference between the opposing side's elected leaders and their base.
I think that's an oversimplification.
Michele Bachman is not a centrist sellout. Dennis Kucinich is not a centrist sellout. They may be centrist within the regions that elected them, though. (Chris explicitly pointed out this distinction.) It's only the politicians with serious prospects nationally who have to look like sellouts to their activists at large. And of course most activist-minded people will find that the politicians they can actually vote for are centrist sellouts. I bet Bachman doesn't look like a sellout to Republicans in, say, Massachusetts, but the Republicans who can actually vote for Bachman may think she's a wishy-washy compromiser, and the Republicans in New Jersey are stuck with the likes of Scott Brown.
Yup, it's a big old simplification - reality is pretty messy.
As to your specific examples, Kucinich was, indeed, quite an outlier and is no longer in congress. Bachmann's views are probably quite a bit closer to that of the median voter. Even just yesterday she was making wishy-washy statements on the debt limit fight and over at redstate.com you can read Erick Erickson denouncing Republican leaders for "caving on everything".