Hillary Clinton was a member of the Senate for eight years, serving on the Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities. She served as secretary of state for another four years - a tenure she'd like to summarize by pointing to that famous photo of her in the White House Situation Room on the night Osama bin Laden was killed.
Yet in recent polling, pitting her ability to address the threat of terrorism against that of a bombastic businessman from Manhattan, voters view the two about evenly.
Since the beginning of May, a number of polls have asked Americans who they think can do a better job in the fight against terrorism - a question made much more important in the wake of the deadliest terror attack on American soil since 9/11. Those polls have varied, showing, in one case, a wide preference for Donald Trump and, at others, a virtual tie.
The Washington Post and its partners at ABC News have asked this question three times since November, the first time in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Paris that killed more than 130. In the first two polls, Clinton led Trump by wide margins on the question of ability to handle terror, thanks to stronger support for Democrats than Trump enjoyed from Republicans. In the most recent poll, though, the two were virtually tied on the subject.
Attitudes about who would be better track with polling preference. When Clinton had a big lead in our polls, she had a big lead on the question of terrorism. As the race has tightened, she doesn't. But it's not clear that the order of causality goes from concern about terrorism to preference for Trump; the odds are good that it points the other way.
Why? Because the trend in attitudes on terror attacks by party mirrors the overall polling trend. In the most recent survey, after the Republican contest was settled, Republicans have consolidated around Trump as the best alternative to Clinton on terror - and as a candidate. Democrats continue to be split on Clinton, in part because at the point that the poll was taken, the Democratic primary race was still theoretically up for grabs. In 2012, we saw a similar narrowing between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the issue as the Republican race reached its end. In February of that year, Romney trailed Obama by 16 points on the subject; by April, he trailed by only four.
Trump likely benefited more from the terror attacks that overlapped with the primaries than did his Republican competitors. FiveThirtyEight looked at this in March. Trump and Ben Carson were about tied at the moment of the Paris attacks; after, as one might have predicted, Carson tanked.
Americans are more worried about terrorism than they have been in the past, and Orlando is likely to heighten that tension. The fact that Trump is currently running even with Clinton on the issue - and even leading her in some polls, like Fox's and Gallup's - still seems like a positive for the soon-to-be Republican nominee. National defense has long been a Republican strength, but it's an issue where a Clinton-Trump matchup seems uniquely suited to favor the Democrat.
Thanks, no doubt, to skepticism about Clinton's effectiveness in her prominent roles, she has no such advantage at this point in the race.
Previously:
• 05/25/16: Donald Trump's primary success may have convinced him to make a critical error
• 05/06/16: So you want an independent candidate for president? You're running out of time
• 04/27/16: How Donald Trump dominated Tuesday's primaries
• 04/14/16: Trump's complaints about process are just whining
• 04/11/16: Trump's terrible night in Colorado exemplifies his campaign's Achilles' heel
• 04/04/16: In the year of Trump, a made-up news website run by an ex-convict finds success
• 03/30/16: Is Donald Trump a politician? An investigation
• 03/29/16: California could hand Donald Trump the GOP nomination --- and then doom him on election night
• 03/28/16: Let's uproot the pernicious, unproven claim that Ted Cruz attacked Donald Trump's wife
• 03/24/16: Why Donald Trump is poised to win the nomination and lose the general election, in one poll
• 03/23/16: The Brussels attacks and the increasing isolationism of Donald Trump
• 03/21/16: Will the GOP really keep trying to Stop Trump for four more months? It'll be tough
• 03/10/16: The unravelling of a political messiah
• 03/08/16: Hillary's bogus electability argument
• 03/07/16: Donald Trump has not brought 'millions and millions' of people to the Republican Party
• 03/02/16: Trump cites his $100,000-a-year golf resort as proof of his efforts on equality
• 02/23/16: Ted Cruz isn't running a dirty campaign, but that perception just cost a staffer his job
• 02/22/16: How Donald Trump won South Carolina
• 02/19/16: Trump says he'll win independents and New York state, but the numbers don't
• 02/19/16: Does Trump have a ground game? We probably still won't know after South Carolina
• 02/17/16: The Bush family reinvented itself to dominate politics --- which is now Jeb's problem
• 01/27/16: The dead people of America really don't want Hillary Clinton to be president
• 01/21/16: Sarah Palin's son, and the link between combat duty and veteran violence
• 01/18/16: The dark undercurrent for Hillary Clinton in Sunday's Dem debate
• 11/23/15: Just so you know: The government already has a list of Muslims in the U.S.