Polls from Quinnipiac University this morning showed very close races between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. (He leads her by four percentage points in Ohio.)

Nate Cohn, The Upshot’s politics analyst, and Toni Monkovic, an Upshot editor, discussed the polls and other battleground states in a Slack chat that has been lightly edited:

Toni What do you make of the Quinnipiac polling today? It’s sure to scare liberals.

Nate I think there are two basic ways to look at them.

On the one hand, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Clinton has a comfortable edge in the battleground states. Quinnipiac, for good measure, has been pretty tough on the Democrats over the last few cycles. You can see some sign of that in the racial composition of the surveys. In Florida, for instance, Quinnipiac’s registered voters are 69 percent white, 11 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic. The official data from the Florida secretary of state (since voters are asked their race when they register to vote) is 65.7 percent white, 13.3 percent black and 14.8 percent Hispanic. Similarly, the census’ current population survey in 2014 found that 64.3 percent of registered voters were white, 15.2 percent were black and 17.9 percent Hispanic.

On the other hand, this can be a pretty volatile period in the race. The polls typically get a lot more accurate between the end of the primaries and the few weeks after the conventions. The parties unify, the electorate gets a bit more polarized. You could imagine something similar benefiting Donald Trump, who has just wrapped up the nomination and has an opportunity to consolidate Republican voters. So I think we should keep an eye out over the next few months to see whether he benefits from the end of the primary process.