WILL GOP’S BATTLE CRY BE ‘REMEMBER KAVANAUGH?’

political debate in just a matter of weeks. With less than a month to go until the election, the battle for control of the Senate has been nationalized by the showdown over the Supreme Court, and for the moment has left Democrats alarmed and Republicans elated.

The news could shift quickly in the month before the election; change is perhaps the only constant in the Trump era. But in a year in which crucial Senate races will play out in a series of heavily rural states that President Donald Trump carried, a riveting, made-for-television clash over gender, politics and privilege is hardly what Democrats like Heitkamp had hoped would frame the final stretch of the election.

“The smart political vote would have been to vote for Kavanaugh,” Heitkamp said after marching in a six-block parade here, acknowledging that her opposition would anger some of the state’s voters and that she’d rather focus on trade and tariffs, “not a Supreme Court nomination.”

But, Heitkamp said, “that’s the way it just goes.”

Republicans, for their part, not only delivered a conservative majority on the high court but galvanized conservative-leaning voters in a campaign that previously had been dominated by a surge in Democratic enthusiasm.

“There is nothing that unifies all stripes of Republicans more than a court fight,” Mcconnell said in an interview, adding: “They stupidly handed us the best issue they possibly could going into the fall election. And it totally underscores the importance of keeping a Republican Senate.”

There are real risks for Republicans. Seating a man on the nation’s highest court who was accused in searing terms of sexual misconduct has only enraged many women who were already eager to register their contempt for Trump at the polls.

And it may further imperil the party’s tenuous House majority and its prospects in a handful of big-state governor’s races that could turn on anti-trump energy.but the terms of the debate have shifted profoundly for Democratic Senate candidates.

From North Dakota and Missouri to Montana and Tennessee, they have tried to localize races, either ignoring Trump or highlighting their willingness to work with him while downplaying the court fight and emphasizing regional issues.

In Montana, Sen. Jon Tester and his allies have assailed his Republican opponent, Matt Rosendale, a Maryland native, as an East Coast real estate developer. In Missouri, Sen. Claire Mccaskill has taken every chance to highlight the Ivy League and law professor background of her GOP challenger, Josh Hawley.

At the same time, Phil Bredesen, the Democratic Senate nominee in Tennessee, has done just about everything he can to distance himself from national Democrats. He has spent much of his campaign talking about his tenure as governor and as Nashville’s mayor, and even tried to inject the invasion of Asian carp in the state’s waterways as an issue in the race.

And Heitkamp has portrayed herself as a champion of North Dakota’s farmers and ranchers, recording ads of herself standing in knee-high soybean fields.

Now, though, Republicans in these races are using the court clash to turn the campaign into more of a national referendum on the fate of their 51-49 majority and a test of which side the voters are on: that of Trump and Kavanaugh or the angry Democratic opposition.

“I hope the battle cry of Republicans for the next 30 days will be ‘Remember Kavanaugh,’ ” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, RIowa and the Judiciary Committee chairman, at a Republican dinner Sunday in Iowa.

Cramer, referring to his state’s electorate, said that “280,000 people are going to decide something that’s got very significant national implications,” adding that the Kavanaugh showdown demonstrated “with great clarity what can happen if those crazy people get control of the government.”

Cramer as well as the Republican candidates in Missouri and Indiana repeatedly invoke Senate Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer when they criticize their rivals for opposing Kavanaugh, and Rosendale has even unveiled a commercial linking Tester’s vote to the protesters who are confronting Republicans in restaurants and other public spaces.

What concerns Democrats is that the elevation of national issues, and particularly the Supreme Court, which is so easily linked with abortion and other cultural flashpoints, may exacerbate their difficulties in rural America.

And Trump, in part because Republican candidates do not want him campaigning in major cities or moderate suburbs, is compounding the Democrats’ quandary by repeatedly touching down for rallies in smaller, heavily conservative regions.

The Democratic candidates in red states do not need to win most, or even a majority, of the less-populated areas of their states. But as was demonstrated vividly in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, they cannot get trounced there.

Asked in an interview over coffee in Bismarck what would happen if the campaign becomes a test of red-versus-blue loyalties, Cramer did not hesitate: “She’s toast,” he said of Heitkamp, adding, “But she’s done her best to try and make it not that.”

Heitkamp, however, plainly recognizes the peril in her vote against Kavanaugh.

She immediately taped and began airing a commercial in which she directly addresses the camera and notes she voted for Justice Neil Gorsuch, adding that “there are many conservative judges who can fill this job without tearing our country apart.”

Her choice was “a lose-lose proposition,” said state Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, a Republican, noting that Heitkamp would have deflated her base had she supported Kavanaugh but that a majority of voters here clearly supported his confirmation.

In Bismarck, the Republican-leaning state capital, interviews with voters at two breakfast hubs Saturday illustrated what a political bind Heitkamp was in.

Outside the Little Cottage Cafe, Lee Klein, a retired insurance executive who supports Heitkamp and called Cramer “a weasel,” was blunt about what he thought the consequences would be for Heitkamp.

“That vote today is going to sink her,” said Klein, who wrote in Harry S. Truman for president in 2016, pointing to “the polarization of the parties.”

At Terra Nomad, more of a scone-and-latte setting, four women who try to avoid talking politics and did not want to share their names with a reporter were divided: One said she would have been disappointed had Heitkamp supported Kavanaugh while another said she would grudgingly support Cramer because of the senator’s vote.

In Rutland, a historically Democratic corner in the southeastern part of the state — bulwark of Heitkamp’s 3,000-vote victory in 2012 — many voters thanked the senator for her opposition to Kavanaugh.

The senator’s brother, Joel Heitkamp, however, acknowledged how challenging it would be to run a national race here.

“I can sit here and lie to you about it and say it’s not a big deal but it’s a big deal, it’s a really big deal,” said Joel Heitkamp, a former state legislator from this area who now has his own radio talk show.

“Our hope is that people see it, they appreciate it for the honesty it was and they move on to the overall message of being anti-tariff and pro-farmer,” he said.

North Dakota was once a pillar of prairie populism, flirting with socialism and creating a state bank and a state mill that still exist today.

Only a decade ago it sent three Democrats to Congress and gave Barack Obama 45 percent of its vote. Since then, however, it has seen its Democratic Party hollow out, losing legislative seats, including in this region, and giving Hillary Clinton just 27 percent.

“People think the Democrats have focused too much on culture, and culture that doesn’t reflect their values,” Heitkamp said of her state’s voters.

The senator conceded she was trailing at the moment, but she and Republicans here were skeptical she was down by the double-digit margins some public polls have indicated.

“This isn’t over yet,” she said.