But as everyone else in the world knew, Senator McConnell was never going to give him a vote. And no, he wouldn’t have given Justice Cuéllar a vote either. But in that case, the refusal would have carried a higher political price. It would have energized the Latino vote. It would have made the Supreme Court a more central voting issue to Democratic constituencies than poor Judge Garland ever became.

That it never became that central issue is not all Mr. Obama’s fault. Hillary Clinton’s campaign shares the blame for that, and in fact the Democratic Party generally. I kept waiting in the fall of 2016 for Mrs. Clinton and all of her surrogates to emphasize to liberal voters: Don’t you see, this is our chance! They’ve had the Supreme Court for 30 years. We win, it’s ours! Voting rights, abortion rights, contraception, L.G.B.T. rights, union rights, money in politics, Second Amendment interpretations — if we get this one vote, all of those and more will change in our direction!

The argument never really came. On the other side, it was a key argument, and quite possibly the key argument. All of those “Christian” conservatives knew very well they were voting for a man who was about as Christian as Larry Flynt. But they voted for Donald Trump en masse. They, directed by their political leaders, had their eyes fixed firmly on the prize of that swing Supreme Court seat. Democratic politicians and their voters did not.

So that’s the first thing Democrats must do — learn from the past. We might not be in this situation if they’d played for keeps in 2016.

The second thing the Democrats have to do is fight this nomination to the bitter end. Maintain, even if it’s manufactured, some aura of optimism and eagerness for the battle. Mr. Schumer said all the right things Wednesday afternoon, but if you watch the video, you’ll see he wasn’t exactly breathing fire.

A sports team that’s behind and sees it’s likely to lose can give up midway through the fourth quarter or it can fight until the final second. Doing the former is always remembered as shameful, the latter always as noble. Besides, it’s not the fourth quarter. It isn’t even the end of the first quarter.