Like you, I am waiting for polls to come in. A reminder: the following measures will tend to move together: the Presidential Meta-Margin, the Senate Meta-Margin, the House generic Congressional ballot, and President Obama’s net approval. In the last day, the House and Obama numbers have moved toward Democrats.

This year’s Presidential campaign has been full of drama (much of which is captured in a single current story, that of Donald Trump and Alicia Machado). Despite all the venom and extremeness, actual voter sentiment is more stable than it’s ever been. Compare the history of the state poll snapshot with past elections:

This is calculated using state polls only, with no corrections from national polls or otherwise. The full range swing in electoral votes, calculated from July onward, after the nominations were settled, has gotten smaller and smaller. You think the last month was dramatic, but it wasn’t because of changes in public opinion.

Another way to look at this is the Meta-Margin, which is defined as how far voter opinion is from an electoral toss-up. It is in the same units as the national Clinton-Trump margin, i.e. percentage points.



This is not some peculiarity of recent elections. National opinion used to be much more variable, and got more stable starting in 1996:



Measured in terms of polling margins, this year’s campaign is the most stable of any race in the era of modern polling, going back 65 years. I estimate that 2016 has been slightly more stable than 2012, though not by much. Really, those two elections are basically the record-setters when it comes to stability.

It does not seem to be a coincidence that just as campaign rhetoric has left civility far behind, opinion has become more stable than ever. For example, lots of people know how they feel about white nationalism. Their preference is pretty well set at this point.