Jim Geraghty of National Review Online wonders what impact terrorism threats will have on 2016 election results.

Will the bombs allegedly set by Ahmad Khan Rahami be a major factor in this year’s presidential race? It depends on whether the electorate sees the events of the last 48 hours as sheer luck or a sign that the U.S. government, for all of its flaws, is succeeding in protecting the public.

If you believe that the country is generally safe from terrorism on U.S. soil, then an event like this is not going to change your mind. As former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano put it after an unsuccessful attempt to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit airline flight on Christmas Day 2009, “the system worked.” The police this weekend appear to have moved quickly and decisively: They got Rahami’s fingerprint from the unexploded bomb, matched him to surveillance videos, put his picture out to the public, and within two hours, a sharp-eyed police officer spotted him sleeping in the vestibule of a bar in Linden, N.J. Despite the fact that he fled and started “indiscriminately firing his weapon at passing vehicles” after the officer confronted him, he was subdued before anyone got seriously hurt.

But if you believe that the federal government and the Obama administration want to downplay the threat of terrorism, then the last 48 hours feels like a series of dodged bullets likely to invite complacency. It began with a strange verbal denial that what looked, sounded, and felt like terrorism might not meet some vague official definition of the term. …

… Every time there’s a terrorist attack, America’s elected officials warn the citizenry about the imminent danger of a backlash against innocent Muslim-American citizens. Thankfully, that backlash rarely materializes and very few American mosques face angry mobs carrying torches — although it would be false to say such attacks never occur.

How many Americans hear this warning, implying that the public is some sort of unthinking, rage-filled mob, eager to assault the first headscarf or taquiyah hat it sees, and mutter: “Forget the backlash, how about the lash? Forget the theoretical attack that could come against that group, what about the attack that actually occurred, that could have killed any of us?”