President Donald Trump came to the conclusion that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanuagh needed to be confirmed to avoid depressing GOP turnout in November. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon White House How Trump saved Kavanaugh The president was convinced that the cost to his administration and the GOP would be too great if he abandoned the judge, aides said.

Fox News anchors said Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was compelling. Republican strategists sent panicked text messages anticipating an electoral disaster. And even some Brett Kavanaugh supporters questioned whether he could rescue his nomination.

But as Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court appeared to be crumbling under the weight of sexual assault accusations, President Donald Trump had already become convinced that abandoning the judge would come at too great a cost to his administration and his party’s chances in the midterm elections.


The president, according to half a dozen officials and people working on the confirmation, came to the determination that with the midterms rapidly approaching, he needed the Senate to confirm the conservative justice to avoid depressing GOP turnout come November.

White House aides and allies conceded that throughout the touch-and-go confirmation battle, they weren’t sure whether Kavanaugh would hold on in the face of the sexual assault allegations and the prevailing #MeToo movement that has swept the country for more than a year. But with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) coming out in support of Kavanaugh Friday afternoon — giving the judge enough votes to get through — Trump’s gamble to stand with him has conservatives feeling like they narrowly escaped catastrophe.

“Abandoning Kavanaugh under the existing circumstances would have demoralized the base,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. “One can second-guess individual tactics, but the Kavanaugh confirmation process, win or lose, has been helpful in waking up a lethargic Republican Party.”

Republican strategists said the bruising fight is resonating with their voters — a far cry from the feeling early on, when some worried the judge’s confirmation would slide through so seamlessly that few on the right would even remember. Now, they say, even some voters less favorable to the president are being jolted.

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White House officials have been reviewing polling on the narrowing so-called enthusiasm gap between Republicans and already motivated Democrats in key states. A person familiar with the numbers contended that GOP fervor is peaking at the right moment: Early and absentee voting is underway, or starting up, in Arizona, Ohio, Iowa, Montana and Indiana.

House Republican operatives pointed to a surge in fundraising over the final week of September, including a text message that raised seven times what such solicitations typically average.

Chris Wilson, the Republican pollster, said GOP enthusiasm is up 100,000 voters in Texas, and he’s also seen positive growth in North Dakota, Montana, Nevada and Arizona.

In Georgia, where a new statewide poll found 49 percent say they support confirming the judge, political warfare over Kavanaugh's fate is having a “boomerang effect” on Democrats, said Mark Rountree, a GOP strategist. The state is in the middle of a tense governor’s race, where Republican Brian Kemp is running neck-and-neck with Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Had Kavanaugh’s nomination been withdrawn, Rountree said the fallout may have been similar to the moment last year when Republicans were “deflated after [the late Sen. John] McCain gave the thumbs down to repealing Obamacare.”

Whether it’s enough to counterbalance a gathering blue wave is unknown. Democrats during the confirmation process pointed to massive fundraising hauls and polling they believe positions them well for November. But buttressing the GOP strategists’ confidence is their view that Senate Democrats took a powerful issue and overplayed their hand — “the demonstrators and protesters were too radical,” Anuzis said.

“It was too obvious, too calculating and too much according to articulated political plans,” he said. “Trying to demonize a federal judge, with a distinguished career, for what he may or may not have done in high school didn’t seem credible. Everybody has memories of their high school and college days that they would love to do over.”

Getting Trump supporters to that viewpoint took patience, though, which hasn’t always been a virtue for the White House.

Publicly, Trump and others from the administration made clear that it ultimately fell to Kavanaugh to personally explain himself. And some of his attempts flopped. A Fox News interview, for instance, was considered a mistake inside and outside the White House in terms of his tone, delivery and content.

A person involved in the confirmation recalled worrying that it made Kavanaugh appear shifty, while exposing him to new lines of questioning from critics and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Some of the judge’s classmates told reporters it helped draw them out of the woodwork to offer unflattering character assessments because they disliked the phony choir-boy image he projected.

Kavanaugh backed away from the wholesome persona in what the White House considered his “make or break” moment before the Senate committee last week, when he countered Ford’s account of sexual assault. The judge’s remarks delighted the president and helped buoy people inside the White House who believed him all along but felt he needed to make clear the stakes of the battle, aides said.

After that, Trump went into a string of rallies feeling better about his chances of reshaping the court, telling close associates he believed West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat facing a difficult reelection in a state that heavily favors Trump, was running a tough campaign and would vote with Republicans. Manchin indicated his support Friday.

The White House and outside allies came to see Senate Democrats’ shifting demands — from initially advocating for an FBI investigation into the charges, to criticizing the tight timeline once Republicans acquiesced to a probe, to finally dismissing it as a sham — as helping convince equivocal senators that no amount of due diligence was going to satisfy the judge’s critics.

Democrats dispute these characterizations, arguing the deck was stacked against conducting a thorough investigation. But Trump’s allies said the wall-to-wall media coverage of the original allegations and Democrats’ changing strategies, followed by the flood of articles concentrating on other uncorroborated charges and incorporating the judge’s alcohol drinking habits as a youth, helped delegitimize the more serious accusations.

“I know Trump likes to take on the press for both political and practical reasons, but not everybody in the White House does,” said David Bozell, president of the conservative group ForAmerica.

The strategy focused on using Trump to stand behind Kavanaugh as momentum turned against the judge, while torquing the overall message toward the on-the-fence senators. “Remember the audience,” one ally said earlier this week when focus returned to the president.

Another Republican close to the process said the White House knew it needed Trump’s bullhorn to magnify the message in an intense and diffuse media environment. Although they admitted that nearly every time Trump engaged was a gamble — fanning fears that he might irrevocably offend Republicans whose votes were crucial for the judge’s confirmation.

After Trump sent a Sept. 21 tweet challenging the credibility of Kavanaugh’s first accuser, Collins — one of the few undecided GOP senators at the time — said she was “appalled.” Later, Collins called it “just plain wrong” when Trump’s mocked Ford at a rally in Mississippi, repeating the phrase “I don’t remember.”

The Mississippi rally also miffed other undecided Republicans — Sen. Jeff Flake called it “appalling,” though he ultimately supported the judge, while Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she would oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation, deeming it “wholly inappropriate.”

Trump’s rally antics came only a few days after he called Ford “very credible.” Yet aides said Trump's lines denouncing Ford, and supporting Kavanaugh, generated some of the night's largest applause breaks.

As the process drew out, those involved in the confirmation also indicated they were less concerned about turning off female voters, and instead tried to reframe the debate around wrongly accused men. Trump and his allies asked Americans to consider how they would feel if their family members were falsely accused of sexual assault.

“It is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “What’s happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice.”

Kavanaugh also maintained strong support from White House counsel Don McGahn and Federalist Society Executive Director Leonard Leo, two powerful individuals who recommended the judge for the high court.

In the end, the confirmation gives Trump another bullet point a month before the midterms, something the president can take to the rallies he’s lining up across the country. It also gives down-ballot candidates a talking point, if they chose to deploy it.

“They are going to be talking about the Supreme Court — if Republicans sell this success,” Bozell said. “It’s going to be up to them to sell the passage of this.”