Nine Republican senators are going to be feeling a lot of heat over the coming weeks for their continued blockade of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. As the window for action by the Senate before November narrows—they're taking another 10 days off now—groups allied with the White House are coordinating a strategy to make these senators lives hell when they're back home.
To date, the outside allies have focused on the states with the five most vulnerable GOP incumbents (New Hampshire [Kelly Ayotte], Wisconsin [Ron Johnson], Pennsylvania [Pat Toomey], Ohio {Rob Portman], and Illinois [Mark Kirk]) and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley’s Iowa. Now they’ll be expanding the map to cover three more incumbents up for reelection: Arizona’s John McCain, North Carolina’s Richard Burr and Missouri’s Roy Blunt. […]
Americans United for Change will be heading up the effort to track Republican senators down at town halls and campaign events, often with a collection of mobile billboards in tow, which they’ll also be driving around the neighborhoods where the senators live and have their district offices. They’ll be holding press events, some with workers like nurses and janitors saying they’d be fired if they showed up to work and did their jobs, some with business leaders and law school deans calling attention to the effects of the continued vacancy on the Court and the prospect of more 4-4 decisions, according to the group.
Other allied groups — including the Service Employees International Union, Planned Parenthood and Voto Latino — will also be organizing set events, which will include a town hall in Iowa to turn up the heat on Grassley. In Ohio, where they’re hoping to create a problem for GOP Sen. Rob Portman, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown will be leading a roundtable with mothers on the court issue, and Rep. Tim Ryan will be doing a separate press event.
All of the efforts should garner local media attention, and it's local media that haas been particularly hard on some of these senators, particularly Grassley. This is important, because all of these senators are going to be trying to localize their reelection campaigns as much as possible, divorce themselves from the national party and pretend like the nightmare at the top of their ticket doesn't exist. It's going to be really difficult for them to make the case that this blockade is anything more than their refusal to simply do their jobs.
While the primary goal of the White House and allied groups is to break the blockade and getting hearings and votes for Garland before the election, there's not really a downside to that not happening. There's still the very real possibility that this campaign will contribute to flipping those nine Senate seats. There's absolutely nothing to lose by pointing out to voters that these senators are not doing their job. Then put Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket and you've got maximum pain for these guys.
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