When will the country become more united and less politically polarized and have more landslide elections that become more common? What kind of stuff does each candidate have to say and do to have elections where everyone is united?
Analogues to these scenarios would be the 1932 and 1980 Presidential elections in which the incumbent President was widely seen as a failure, and the challenger is a slick-talking outsider who can offer ebullient optimism about a nearly-diametric change in political life.
But wait -- that also describes 2008 as well. I can see Barack Obama as a mirror image of Ronald Reagan with much the same political skills. So what is different? Maybe President Obama is a poor cultural match outside of Urban America which now includes Northern and Western suburbs.
It may be Barack Obama who is the anomaly, winning 278 electoral votes by 8% or more but losing 141 electoral votes by 8% or more. He was winning by Reagan-like margins in some states while losing by McGovern-like margins in some states. The biggest d@mn-yankee pol there ever was? Could be.
0bama 2008 - Reagan 1980 is fairly similar (actually, Obama got 52.80% of the raw vote and Reagan got 50.75% of the raw vote), at least if one combines the Carter and Anderson vote. Figure that if one combines the Carter and Anderson votes, Reagan still would have won the electoral vote 290-248.
People are often amazed that Reagan won Massachusetts in 1980 -- but he got only 41.90% of the vote. The combined vote for Carter and Anderson that year was 56.90%, which isn't that far from the 61.80% that Obama got in Massachusetts in 2008.
Attitudes toward the Presidency have changed. The mass disdain that President George W. Bush developed by the dreary end of his Presidency may have been well deserved. That against President Obama may not be as well deserved, but it started early with well-organized campaigns. Contrast the norm with Ronald Reagan... maybe he occasionally said something outrageous but he backed down and Americans accepted the retraction. With Barack Obama a well-organized right-wing media kept hitting President Obama hard, never forgiving anything.
Political climates come and go. It could be that Barack Obama is simply a horrible match for the culture of much of America, and no matter what he does he will be held in contempt in much of America.
This may be the sort of election that one expects in a country in which political opinion is not severely polarized. If you are talking about an election in which the winner got just a little more of the raw popular vote (53.39% instead of 52.80%) than Obama got in 2008
FDR won the electoral vote 432-99 in 1944. Of course, America was much more unified in purpose (there was a war going on, even if Hitlerland was in its death throes and Thug Japan was doomed) as America isn't now. Paradoxically, Obama's win is more impressive because of President Roosevelt's biggest wins were in five states (Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana) that did not then have free elections!