OK, I'll accept Kansas because Orman is promising the same kind of bland centrism that is popular with these things (Kansas is in a funny place right now though, and hardly representative of the rest of America).
As for the rest - all those states you mentioned becoming toss-ups prove my point. They aren't becoming toss-ups because half of fervent GOP's woke up one day and thought "huh, maybe I should vote for Obama". It's because of demographic changes. American politics is less and less about convincing people you are right, and more about catering to those who know you're right.
Yeah, but we can still change that narrative. 
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both near perfect examples of that, and John McCain and Mitt Romney aren't way too lousy they either, although they come a far shot away from the two really big guns. If there's something Barack and Hillary have had on their minds for the past decade or so it's certainly to make the US less partisan and more harmonic. Thanks to jerkasses like Rupert Murdoch and all his afilliates, their strategy hasn't yet worked of course. And even bigger obstacle than Rupert Shothead Murdoch is the insanely conservative Supreme Court of course. My point is basically this: Please blame the increasing partisanship of where it belongs: the constitution, the absolutely mind-blowingly insane composition of the Supreme Court (even countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria would never even consider appointing such dumb, right-wing jokes of candidates), gerrymandering, way too many billionaire/big business money in politics, religion in America (the US is in fact almost as darn and dangerously religious as the vast majority of muslim countries in this world), the ridiculous constitutional right to bear arms, the almost equally (almost-constitutional right) to assassine a fellow citizen deemed guilty by someone (most of the time you don't even need the evidence of DNA, just share finger-pointing). I mean, if you try to tell me the US is not a crazy society then you're definitely off on a very wrong mission.
I don't think it matter what any one politician wants. You can honestly believe you have the solutions to help everyone but if people don't believe you, you are no better than the one who can before you. That's the problem right now. There isn't anyone out there that can be believed more than 53% of the voters and rarely more than 51%. At this point, we are a society that's hobbling along and have been since like 6 months into the next century. There's now always a major crisis or distraction every other year now. Whenever we find a new direction, we get sick of it the next year but don't change that direction for another five years after that. The last 15 years reminds me of my first long-term relationship. Of course its not all doom and gloom (fewer unintended pregnancies(and abortions), less discrimination against sexual minorities and fewer uninsured people and crime) but that's all really hard to tell and its all overshadowed by the fact that there is no sustainable or even desirable peace or state of war anymore and there's a double-or-nothing economy.
My thought is that we have had at least two chances to fix things out of their current trajectory. Those were in 2001/2 and 2008/9. It just seems that things might not change unless there's a crisis big enough to make everyone ready to listen.
This all being said, a at least temporary third party in the "radical center" could work but I don't know how. In 1992, we had a real 3-way horse race, right?
