Let the games begin. Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a 53-year-old D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge with a youthful, if doughy, face to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, and Chuck Schumer has already issued at least five condemnatory tweets. “Brett Kavanaugh would have helped the Trump administration keep a young girl in federal custody to prevent her obtaining constitutionally protected health care” was one. “Kavanaugh frequently sides with powerful interests rather than defending the rights of all Americans” was another. And that was before he was even nominated.

It’s an interesting choice for Trump, who seems to have been more drawn to Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Thomas Hardiman (also a favorite of Trump’s sister). Kavanaugh surely pleases Trump by having ruled that presidents shouldn’t be burdened by criminal prosecutions and civil suits while in office, but he’s pretty tightly tied to the least-loved and most partisan parts of the establishment Republican Party—with a hand in the Starr report and Florida recount and George W. Bush White House, among other things. Trump might reasonably fear that this was a man more devoted to the G.O.P. machine than the Trump machine. But the share of Trump’s base that cares about immigration enforcement was strongly opposed to Hardiman (why is a separate matter), and impassioned opponents of Kavanaugh were fewer and more eccentric.

If nothing else, this moment offers a useful reminder that the divides in our country are only partly Trump-related. Kavanaugh could have been picked by any Republican president, and Democrats would have been equally upset. But that’s probably not much of a consolation to anyone, so let’s go back to the immediate fight at hand. What can we expect?

For Republicans, moments like this are, for the most part, unifying. Senators who fight about everything else can usually agree on supporting a Supreme Court nominee from a fellow Republican or Democrat. For Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who likes to do most things quietly (ideally sneakily), occasions like this are regrettably high-profile, and a candidate who can be screened and seated quickly would be preferable to one who advances ambitious ideological goals. So it must be a disappointment to him that Trump picked Kavanaugh, a forceful partisan with a long paper trail. As strong as feelings within the conservative movement run, however, the differences among Republicans will be hard to spot when it comes to Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight.

For Democrats, Kavanaugh is enough of a partisan knife fighter to unify them easily in opposition, however futile it might be. They know they’re in the minority, with no power to thwart a united majority, but they see three possible outcomes: a fluke of good fortune (their dream), a battle that backfires on Democrats (their nightmare), or a battle that costs Republicans (their aim).

The fluke of good fortune would be for Kavanaugh to turn out, over the course of hearings, to be such a fiasco of a choice that even Republicans would defect. Maybe Kavanaugh turns out to be in a cult that requires, say, punching horses in the face, and claims and counterclaims run for months. That pushes the next set of hearings to 2019, past the midterms, when Democrats would have gained a majority. As plans go, it’s more realistic than invading a clannish Middle-Eastern dictatorship in order to transform it into a liberal democracy, but that’s not saying much.

The battle that backfired on Democrats would be one that caused them to look so obnoxious in their attacks on Kavanaugh that they lost more support among voters than they gained. Nominees, even the extreme ones, are usually pretty sympathetic, especially when they bring their spouses and children to watch, and Kavanaugh has two young daughters. Raising your voice at daddy and accusing him of all sorts of –isms can look ungracious. While the odds of Democrats overplaying their hand so egregiously is low, those who come from the red states might still be concerned.

A battle that costs Republicans a lot of capital—and this is what Democrats are aiming for—is one that results in a confirmation of Kavanaugh (because it’s unavoidable) but a loss in the great war of public opinion. This is the sweet spot of political combat: the place where your enemy, to appease the base, alienates the majority. When the president picks a Supreme Court Justice, pressures of simple party loyalty are extreme. For Democrats, therefore, the aim is to accept that senators from less-red states will vote for Kavanaugh but to make them hate every minute of it. They achieve that by winning the narrative—in this case, to go by Chuck Schumer’s groundwork on Twitter, that Kavanaugh will overturn Roe v. Wade and undo all protections for the little guy—and everyone associated with him or her emerges weakened.