No, this will not be a close election.

This post is the first in a three-part series analyzing likely outcomes of Tuesday's Presidential Election. It is not an endorsement of any candidate or party.

No, I'm not writing to predict a Romney/Ryan landslide Nor am I predicting that Obama cruises to re-election. Instead, I'll defy convention wisdom and predict that--regardless of how close the popular vote is--whichever candidate pulls through one week from today will do some with a healthy margin in the electoral college. We won't be up all night, and we certainly won't have to wait days or weeks like we did after the debacle of 2000. Election 2012 should be settled relatively early.

Swing States
First, some background: My electoral math will refer to the RealClearPolitics Electoral Map as a baseline, with the notable exception that I'll consider Minnesota to be a toss-up. Under this map, Obama and Romney have both already locked up 191 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. As a result, we're now working with a smaller map of 12 states totalling 156 electoral votes. The first candidate to reach 79 wins. I'll classify these states into two tiers:

• Tier one: Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire are true swing states where neither campaign has been able to secure an advantage. These states combine for 60 electoral votes.
• Tier two: Nevada, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida and North Carolina have 96 electoral votes. While each of these states could still go either way, Obama is the favorite in the first four while Romney appears to have the upper hand in the latter two.

So where does that leave us? The prevailing narrative is that--as swing states--both candidates have roughly a coin flip's chance of winning each of these 12 states. Now, if you flip a coin 12 times, you'd extrapolate that average to estimate that the coin will land on heads six times and on tails six times. Thus it might seem like the most likely outcome next Tuesday is that each candidate wins six states and nets approximately 78 electoral votes (which would result in a 269-269 tie*). We'd be looking at an extremely close election.

Riding the Wave
In our coin flip analogy, you expect to get heads in 50 percent of your flips because each flip of the coin is an independent event. That is, if your coin shows tails on the first flip, your odds of flipping heads on your second try don't change a bit.

But it doesn't work this way in electoral politics. Most presidential elections are marked by some undercurrent that transcends state borders and causes one candidate to consistently overperform his poll results on Election Night. In 2008, for example, a wave of enthusiasm carried Barack Obama to a landslide victory. John McCain managed to win Missouri by a tenth of a percent, but EVERY other swing state went to Obama.

The 2000 presidential election provides another example. Most of us have long since forgotten, but going into November, many pundits expected George W. Bush to win handily. Election Day, however, saw a late Al Gore surge that wasn't picked up by the polls. As a result, Gore picked up victory after victory in swing states like Oregon, New Mexico and most of the Rust Belt (including a razor thin victory in Wisconsin). The only thing that saved Bush from complete electoral collapse is that--just as McCain managed to narrowly win Missouri for his lone swing state victory in 2008--he held on to win Florida.

Why 2012 Won't Be Close
It's difficult to say what sort of wave will carry Mitt Romney or Barack Obama to victory next week. Perhaps it will be the President's response (good or bad) to Hurricane Sandy. Perhaps it will be unexpected high or low turnout from one candidate's core voters. Maybe we'll even see a last-minute dirty campaign trick that will move public opinion.

But whatever it is and whoever it benefits, some sort of national trend will almost certainly emerge. As a result, we might expect to see one candidate carry five or all six of our tier 1 states.

So when the Romney campaign says it doesn't need Ohio because it could also get to 270 by winning Iowa and Wisconsin, don't believe the hype. If Romney wins a state like Wisconsin--which hasn't gone red since Reagan--there's no way he loses Ohio.

What to Watch For
How quickly will we recognize this wave on Election Night? We should start to get a sense reasonably early as 10 of our 12 swing states are in the Eastern or Central time zones. That means if you're a Romney fan and Obama pulls out a victory in Florida or Virginia early in the evening, you might want to turn off the TV because there's no point in hoping your guy makes it up in Colorado and Nevada. Similarly, if Romney picks up a swing state or two early in the evening--particularly north of the Mason-Dixon Line, you can almost certainly start to celebrate.

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In part two of this series (later this week, God willing), we'll examine the numbers and trends that lead me to believe Barack Obama will be re-elected and what that electoral map might look like. And in part three, we'll discuss why I think Mitt Romney just might pull off the upset and how such an electoral map would shake out.

*This line of thinking is exactly why political media have been salivating over the prospects of a tied election and the ensuing constitutional crisis.