WASHINGTON — Public opinion polls and political pundits suggest a tightening race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but the way the business community is acting, the election is over.

And Hillary Clinton has won.

Notwithstanding recent Wall Street jitters, most business and financial indicators are betting on a continuation of the current path, with a President Clinton extending Obama administration policies, kept in check by a GOP-controlled House.

The stock market, for example, has been unusually calm for months, especially in light of the ugly campaign and often unpredictable comments and behavior of Trump, who has at various times attacked Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, vowed to renegotiate long-standing trade deals and warned of an impending stock market collapse.

In the final week of the campaign, investors may have started to take notice. The last several days have seen consecutive losses in the broad S&P 500 index, although weaknesses in energy stocks and other factors have also hung over investors. Still, the S&P and the Dow remain above levels from the start of the year and are down less than 5 percent from record highs earlier in the summer.

Moreover, an absence of significant financial hedging and stability in other indicators measuring risk and uncertainty suggest that most business leaders and investors are expecting a Clinton victory Tuesday.

“What you see almost uniformly is this belief in the continuation of the status quo,” said Andrew Lowenthal, a principal at Monument Policy Group, a government relations and public affairs firm.

Given the wild-card nature of Trump's candidacy, Lowenthal said, one would think executives might be planning for contingencies and giving shareholders some guidance about the future. “But there's no discussion, not even lip service to it,” he said.

A few companies, such as Dunkin' Donuts, have blamed uncertainty over the election for weakness in sales. And some investors overseas appear to be getting nervous about the closeness of the race.

But Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor, said that judging by the political uncertainty index that he and fellow economists constructed, “no one is putting much weight in his (Trump's) winning.”

The index — based largely on newspaper articles related to the economy and government policy — has averaged 87 in recent days, below the long-term average of around 100. By contrast, after the surprising British vote in June to leave the European Union, the index shot up to more than 300 over several days.

“If Trump were likely to win, there'd be a massive amount of uncertainty” reflected in the index, Bloom said.

Markets also point to a Clinton White House. Clinton, for example, has railed against high drug prices and could take a tougher hand with big pharmaceutical firms — and analysts say that's reflected in the industry's 7 percent stock slide in the last year.

Meanwhile, there's been a jump in sales recently at gunmaker Smith & Wesson, a sign that people expect Clinton will push through tougher rules on gun ownership, said Lowenthal of Monument Policy.

“These are the Second Amendment defenders who are the bedrock of Trump's support,” Lowenthal said. “You don't do that if you think Trump is going to be president and make it easier to buy a gun.”

What if things don't turn out the way business leaders expect? Given the lack of stock put in a Trump victory, there's little doubt that such an outcome would trigger an initial shock to financial markets, just as the so-called Brexit vote did.

Anthony Scaramucci, a member of Trump's economic policy council, thinks that the polls have it wrong, just as they did with Brexit.

Top corporate executives and others, he said, are reluctant to voice support for Trump, even if they secretly want him to win.

don.lee@latimes.com