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News Analysis

Can Hillary Clinton Keep You Safe?

Credit...Ben Wiseman

When you’re scared, do you feel safer with Mommy or with Daddy?

That, at heart, is the visceral question voters must address as they consider whether Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump is the leader they trust to protect them in an age of terror. A key test will come in Monday’s debate.

Like so much else in this confounding election, the answers explode just about everything we thought we knew.

This campaign has seen an eruption of old-fashioned misogyny. The insults to Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina. The “Hang the Bitch” chants. The testosterone on display at Trump rallies. This sexism coexists with — indeed, is most likely prompted by — a change in gender attitudes that tears up the old political playbooks.

The conventional wisdom among political scientists and pollsters has long held that voters drew on traditional gender roles in deciding whom to trust on what issue, said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Men, with their claims to strength and aggression, traditionally scored better on national security, crime and defense. They had the electoral advantage in times of threat.

Women, with their feminine traits of compassion, warmth and caregiving, edged men out on issues such as education, health care and children. When domestic issues dominated an election, their chances improved.

Party affiliation tended to reinforce these stereotypes. Republicans were seen as the stronger party on national defense, Democrats as weak. Republican men had two points in their favor: their gender and their party; Democratic women were the worst off.

So what happens in this election, when the Democratic woman has all the experience in national security and the Republican man has none, but has built a following by talking tough?

It turns out that these stereotypes are just as outdated in politics as they are in society.

Jennifer L. Lawless, a professor of government at American University, conducted a national survey around the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. She found that two-thirds of the American public trusted men more than women to lead them in times of national security peril.

Those findings no longer hold. In 2010 and 2014, she and Danny Hayes of George Washington University found no evidence of these old tropes in national surveys and analyses of news coverage of congressional races. Most people trusted male and female candidates equally on national security.

Today, political affiliation matters more than gender. “Whether there’s a D or R in front of your name is way more a cue to voters than the presence or the absence of the Y chromosome,” Ms. Lawless said.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2014 suggests that some resistance remains. While a majority of Americans believe that men and women are equally capable of defending America, far more Republicans are skeptical: 46 percent believe men are more capable in national security matters, compared with 32 percent of Democrats.

To further muddy the waters, individual men and women don’t always react like stereotypical men and women. Some men display traditionally feminine traits of compassion or emotional sensitivity; some women embrace masculine qualities of competition and aggressiveness.

Monika L. McDermott, an associate professor of political science at Fordham, applied a personality assessment to find that voters with “masculine” personality types — whether men or women — are more likely to support Republicans, while voters with “feminine” traits are more likely to support Democrats. Intriguingly, though, she found that most Americans are neither strongly feminine nor masculine, but have equal amounts of both traits.

That, Ms. McDermott argues, gives Hillary Clinton an advantage. She, too, is a mix of masculine and feminine — hawkish on defense, competitive and aggressive, but also someone who presents herself as compassionate, a lover of children and an advocate of families.

“In some ways Hillary has transcended biological sex,” Ms. McDermott said. “She’s not just a woman, she’s Hillary Clinton.”

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is all guy. His aggression has resonated among working-class white men who feel emasculated by economic disruption and changing gender roles. But that very hyper-masculinity, in addition to his policies, has alienated women and could dampen his appeal to independents, she said.

Political scientists also know that the influence of gender varies depending on the tenor of the times. At moments of anxiety, voters often turn to men who project resolution and demand action, said Mirya R. Holman, an assistant professor of political science at Tulane.

And this campaign has coincided with terrorist attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, Calif., to this month’s bombings in New York City and New Jersey.

Psychologists talk about three basic dimensions in the way we perceive people and groups, said John Dovidio, a professor of psychology at Yale: warmth, competence and activity (or agency). His research suggests that politicians do not have to be perceived as competent to be seen as effective at taking action. That may be the reason a man with no experience in national security but plenty of sound bites has traction.

“When we’re threatened we want to feel like we’re doing something,” Mr. Dovidio said. “Doing nothing creates a sense of powerlessness. What Trump appeals to is that sense of agency. The simplicity of his reactions may be reassuring to people even if they don’t believe he’s particularly competent or has that experience.”

At the same time, however, he said: “A threat arouses insecurity. And we want to be protected, but part of that protection may be a more immediate need to be comforted.” In that case, he suggested, gender stereotypes might work in Mrs. Clinton’s favor.

She also has all the competence, he said; the latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows 49 percent of voters see Mrs. Clinton as more competent in national security and terrorism, compared with 45 percent for Mr. Trump. The parade of endorsements by neoconservative security experts also bolsters the idea that a woman can be commander in chief, while potentially alarming those “feminine” voters who are suspicious of her hawkishness. And Mrs. Clinton has struggled to persuade people to trust her.

All this suggests that explicit appeals to gender don’t always work in predictable ways.

Appeals to fear don’t always push voters to male candidates. Mr. Trump’s poll numbers did not go up after the attack in Orlando, Fla. Ms. Holman and her colleagues conducted surveys during the Republican National Convention suggesting some voter fatigue with fear mongering. “The people who are scared are already scared, and the people who aren’t scared are already immune,” she said.

But appeals to feminist pride aren’t necessarily helping Mrs. Clinton, either. In other research, Ms. Holman found fatigue with her campaign’s attempt to tap into gender inspiration. “Yeah, yeah, you’re the first woman,” she said.

Monday’s debate will be the first one-on-one confrontation where we can watch these gender assumptions play out. Polarizing candidates, scrambled ideas of men’s and women’s roles, and a worried electorate. For once, we won’t close our ears as Mommy and Daddy fight.

Susan Chira is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New York Times.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Can She Keep You Safe?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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