From my point of view, the objective should not be to win by a landslide. The objective should be to win an election with the votes the top 51% of the voting population who are most freedom loving.
Nixon's landslide was bad -- he moved too far left.
But beyond the witicism [at least I think it's a witicism...could be the truth, I suppose] that's a hard call when you are running an election. When you run an election you have to go for every single vote that it's possible to get. Elections are too amorphous to control that expertly...expertly enough to know that you are getting just the 51% and that it's only the "right" people voting for you. You've got to go all out to get as many votes as you can...because in an election you control very little of what is happening out in the voting society.
You just can't cut it that fine. If you tried, you'd probably end up losing 90% of the time. Any little thing that could go wrong would sink you (ask either Bush...or Gore). You need margins, you need to appeal broadly because you just don't know how many votes from strange and different places you are going to need to win.
And the worst thing in the world...the biggest waste of your life's time and money is spending it in the nasty business of elections, if you are going to risk losing. No bigger bummer, nothing that could be a bigger, more unpleasant waste of your time. No human being in their right mind subject themselves to it unless they were really going to try everything to win. Losing is just a complete waste, it never gains anything.