The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court will be a vital test case of whether Democrats can mobilize voters nationwide over abortion rights.

It’s likely their only real path to stopping Kavanaugh, but there’s more to it than that. Energizing voters in support of Roe v. Wade, Democrats believe, will be even more important if they lose the Supreme Court battle and are forced to defend abortion rights at the ballot box — offering them an issue that could change the national political dynamic around abortion.

“Any path to defeating Kavanaugh requires us to not forget what is perhaps the central issue, and that’s the future of reproductive rights in this country,” said Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a liberal judicial group. “You cannot have a successful strategy unless Roe is at the center of it.”

Top Democrats, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, are joining up with abortion rights groups to brand Roe — along with preserving the Affordable Care Act — as the central issue of the Supreme Court battle. In an age when policy is increasingly enacted through regulation or the courts, the stakes couldn’t be higher for the party: If Kavanaugh or a similar judge is confirmed, they would tilt the court to the right for decades.

The hope is to generate the kind of energy around opposing Kavanaugh — phone calls to senators, protests, marches — that Democrats believed helped them to stop the repeal of the Affordable Care Act last year, and that propelled millions of women into nationwide marches in the months following Trump’s election.

But that could be a difficult proposition for a party that has, for decades, struggled to mobilize voters on issues involving the courts — something the Republican Party has done well. And it would reflect a shift for the party, placing a much more explicit emphasis on abortion rights than Democrats have typically employed on the national level.

“So far, it’s been hard to get people to care about the Supreme Court,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who has been closely tracking social media activity posts about Kavanaugh’s nomination. Posts about the Supreme Court have lagged behind other topics, the aide said: “It’s hard to get people to pay attention.”

The hope, the aide said, is that “once we get to the fall, when [Kavanaugh’s hearings] are on the news every day, the message will start to resonate.

In 2016, “the Supreme Court” became a mantra for Republicans attempting to turn out voters skeptical of Trump — an issue comparatively discussed far less by Democrats. But the looming threat to Roe vs. Wade, Democrats hope, could help to shift decades of relative Democratic disinterest in the courts, especially when paired with a renewed interest, since the 2016 election, in the way congressional districts are drawn.

A large majority of American voters, polling shows, support keeping Roe on the books; two subsequent rulings — Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt — are less well-known than Roe but foundational to abortion law in the United States. Though Kavanaugh has only hinted at his views on Roe, Trump has promised to appoint judges who would oppose it, saying of overturning the decision, “That will happen and that will happen automatically.”

Just as the 2017 health care battle did, the narrow path to beating Kavanaugh runs through two Republican women, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — both moderates who have supported abortion rights in the past. Democrats believe that intense political pressure from voters around Roe could force both senators to oppose Kavanaugh.

In a sense, much of what plays out over Kavanaugh’s nomination will be a performance staged for Collins and Murkowski. The health care advocacy organization Protect Our Care, for example, has designated a budget of $200,000 to spend in one week on ads and actions that mostly target those two Republican senators, the organization’s executive director, Brad Woodhouse, said on a call with reporters Monday.

“Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski ... those are the most important Republicans,” Woodhouse said on the call. “I have every reason to believe that if Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins came out against this nomination that there would be a majority to oppose him.”