State of the Race: A Calm Week and Perhaps the Clearest Picture Yet

With five weeks to go until the election, the polls show a close and stable race for president.Overall, Kamala Harris is ahead of Donald J.Trump by three percentage points in The New York Times’s average of national polls, while the race remains extraordinarily close in the seven key battleground states.

No candidate enjoys a significant lead in states worth the 270 electoral votes needed to win.If you’ve read this weekly polling update before, that summary might sound pretty familiar.The polls have been remarkably steady, with no clear indications of any meaningful shift either way.Still, there is something different about the polls this past week.

It’s not a difference in the top-line numbers, but the context: This was a relatively calm week of political news, at least compared with the last few months.As a result, this might be the clearest read we’ve had of the race so far.

It was arguably the first “quiet” week since Vice President Harris’s entry into the race.Think of all that happened from late July to mid-September.Over just that short span, Ms.

Harris became her party’s nominee; she selected her vice-presidential running mate; the Democrats held their convention; Ms.Harris and Mr.

Trump debated; and then an assassination attempt against Mr.Trump was thwarted on Sept.

15.At every stage, these events made it harder to be sure the polls were offering a relatively unvarnished assessment of the race.It was reasonable to wonder, for instance, whether Ms.

Harris’s standing was being inflated by a series of media-driven bounces.Good news for Mr.

Trump, on the other hand, could be interpreted as a sign that an earlier Harris bounce was fading....