The GOP’s brief edge on foreign policy appears to have vanished:

It’s possible that this could change back again in the next year, but it is notable that the party’s numbers on foreign policy have started slumping during the same period in which Republican candidates for president have been going out of their way to emphasize their foreign policy views. My guess is that the party benefited in 2014 and early 2015 from the continuing spate of bad news stories from overseas that reflected badly on administration policies, but more recently as the many Republican candidates have been holding forth on the kind of foreign policy they would conduct those gains have evaporated. This suggests that Republicans really shouldn’t want 2016 to be an election with a heavy emphasis on foreign policy issues, and if these issues do play a large role in the election it is going to work against them.

Despite substantial and in some cases well-deserved dissatisfaction with Obama’s foreign policy record, most Americans are still understandably wary of trusting the GOP on foreign policy given the previous administration’s record and the aggressive hawkishness of its presidential candidates. There may be many Americans that perceive Obama as being insufficiently “tough” in his foreign policy, but that doesn’t mean that there is much enthusiasm for a party pushing a hard-line agenda, either. The more that the Republican candidates advertise their hard-line views on Iran, Cuba, or anything else, the harder it will be to win over the public to their side.