While most of the campaign coverage is dominated by familiar cliches of the race being too close to call, nail-biting, and down-to-the-wire, there is arguably a lot more known about the Nov. 6 vote than there is unknown. According to the Constitution, the presidential election is actually 51 separate races. Each of those races is a winner-takes-all contest for a certain number of votes in the Electoral College. (Note: My Atlantic colleague Chris Heller points out this is not entirely correct since Nebraska and Maine award some of their electoral votes proportionally. For the purpose of this math, I assumed those states are winner-take-all.) The presidential candidate who gets 270 or more electoral votes will be the next President. We know the outcome of the vast majority of those 51 contests: New York, California, and Hawaii, and so on, will award their electoral votes to Obama, while Wyoming, Oklahoma, Utah, etc., will award their electoral votes to Romney. In these 41 "known" races, Obama has a huge lead over Romney: 237 electoral votes to 191. Here they are mapped courtesy of 270towin.com.

In the nine remaining toss-up states — Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida — there are 110 electoral votes up for grabs, but because Obama needs only 33 of those votes to win re-election, he wins in the vast majority of the possible scenarios. As a mathematical exercise, Romney has just 76 paths to victory out of the 512 possible combinations.

Here is a spreadsheet with all of the scenarios.

The first time I engaged in this amateur spreadsheet geekery was in 2004 when I was living in Los Angeles and playing a lot of poker (badly, which may warn you away from putting too much faith in my math). A key part of basic poker strategy is knowing at any given time the number of cards remaining in the deck that could help your hand. The idea is to separate the cards you've seen (the ones in your hand and those face-up on the table) from the ones you haven't (those in other people's hand and those still in the deck) and then calculate your odds of getting one of those helping cards. In Texas Hold'em, if you're dealt two aces, the chances of seeing another ace after the flop is the number of aces you weren't dealt (two) divided by the number of cards you haven't seen (47), or 4.26 percent.

Shortly before the 2004 election — which, at least while it was underway, was deemed a close contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry — I realized that you could look at the Electoral College in a similar way as a poker player looks at his hand: you had known states and unknown states, and if you concentrated on all of the possible outcomes rather than trying to predict whether the next card dealt would be an ace or a two, you could calculate odds.