Most Americans think Donald Trump as president would handle terrorism better than Hillary Clinton, according to the latest polls. But when it comes to homegrown extremism, there isn't much difference between their platforms. The messages and delivery vary, but Trump and Clinton's proposals are effectively the same, and they are equally ignorant. Their words prove it.

A narrow focus on Islam. After the Orlando night club shooting, Trump said there are people in "our" country who are "sick with hate, and people that are around him [referring to the shooter], Muslims, know who they are, largely. They know who they are. They have to turn them in."

Meanwhile, Clinton said during a counterterrorism speech at Stanford University, "There are millions of peace-loving Muslims … These Americans are a crucial line of defense against terrorism. They are the most likely to recognize the warning signs of radicalization before it's too late, and the best positioned to block it."

In sentiment, these statements are worlds apart, but in practice, the ideas are the same. The counterterrorism focus is on Muslims, ignoring other motivating ideologies; the solution is for Muslim communities to identify potential threats; and the implication, by extension, is that Muslim-American communities to this point have not sufficiently rejected radicalization.

Ramping up domestic intelligence. Trump said in June with regard to intelligence gathering that "we have to go and we have to maybe check, respectfully, the mosques. And we have to check other places." He also said during his August 15 terrorism speech that he would set up a "Commission on Radical Islam," in part to "develop new protocols for local police officers, federal investigators and immigration screeners."

Clinton's national security platform, as it relates to homegrown terrorism, proposes "supporting first responders, law enforcement, and intelligence officers with the right tools, resources, intelligence, and training to prevent attacks before they happen." She also offers an ominous sounding "intelligence surge to get security officials the tools they need to prevent attacks."

Both proposals focus on gathering intelligence to help law enforcement prevent terrorism. Even as Clinton's platform doesn't explicitly mention mosques, one wonders where her "intelligence surge" would be directed. Since her stated platform and all of her speeches focus exclusively on Muslim extremism, we can presume the proposed surge would relate to Muslim communities and where they interact. The difference from Trump's proposal is in the semantic weeds.

Looking largely "over there." Both nominees are focused on transnational terrorism, especially the threat from the Islamic State group. Clinton proposes ongoing air strikes, working with local forces in Iraq and Syria, and collaborating with allies to dismantle "the global network of terror that supplies money, arms, propaganda, and fighters."

Trump wants to "bomb the shit out of them," and as he said in his terrorism speech, "aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy [the Islamic State group], international cooperation to cut off their funding, expanded intelligence sharing and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting."

Even their plans for the Islamic State group are nearly identical. When it comes to counterterrorism, the Democratic and Republican nominees are presenting the same ideas, couched in language tailored to different parts of the electorate. And therein lies a much more troubling fact – it's not just what they're saying; it's what they're not saying.

The trouble with the Trump-Clinton platform. Both nominees look at radicalization and homegrown extremism as a criminal justice issue, touting an end to terrorism by way of law enforcement and intelligence. This ignores more than a decade of work from the Department of Homeland Security, academic institutions and many other organizations revealing that radicalization is a multifaceted phenomenon. Violent online propaganda and extreme religious beliefs are only two parts of a complex puzzle. More intelligence, more arrests and more demands of local communities are not going to prevent people from radicalizing. We cannot arrest our way out of this. We need to focus on addressing root causes, and the nominees don't even mention it.

What is more, Clinton and Trump are only concerned with a narrow segment of the overall homegrown threat, which leaves us vulnerable. There is a fast-growing number of right-wing extremists in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan, white supremacist groups, anti-government militias and others are all driven by dangerous ideologies that have nothing to do with Islam.

But Trump only ever mentions these homegrown extremists when he's denouncing their support, and Clinton only ever says "right-wing" when she's referring to the "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get her. To be fair, Clinton did call the shooting at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston "racist terrorism," but since then, she has consistently used that evident case of homegrown extremism only as a way to encourage stricter gun control and not to discuss counterterrorism and counter-radicalization proposals.