The prospect of brutal confirmation hearings has Republicans targeting red-state Democrats in hopes of softening opposition to some of Donald Trump’s most conservative Cabinet nominees — from Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.

It’s an effort at early damage control, with Republicans aiming to protect their own from a Democratic onslaught that could cause lasting damage both to Trump administration officials and to the president-elect’s ability to push his ambitious legislative agenda through Congress.


To that end, after Christmas, five red state Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018 will find themselves in the cross hairs of an ad campaign pushing them to support Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Behind the effort is the conservative group America Rising Squared, an arm of the Republican opposition research group America Rising that is also launching a website, ConfirmPruitt.com, on Wednesday.

The Democrats — West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, Montana’s Jon Tester, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp — will face ads casting their votes on Pruitt’s nomination as a choice between farmers and regulators, working families and extremist environmentalists.

A similar campaign is already underway on behalf of Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. The website ConfirmSessions.com will soon be accompanied by a six-figure digital ad buy in the Washington, D.C., area. Campaigns on behalf of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Education, and Andy Puzder, who is slated to run the Labor Department, are expected to follow.

Those inside and outside Trump world say these efforts reflect a concern about which nominees are likely to get bruised and battered in their confirmation hearings — not that they won’t be confirmed at all.

“This has less to do with who’s most likely to go down than with who’s most likely to get roughed up,” said a transition aide.

The Judicial Crisis Network, the conservative legal group organizing the pro-Sessions push, echoed the sentiment. “I don't think anybody on the Democratic side actually thinks they're going to beat Sessions,” says Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the group. “We just want to make sure they don't get to use Sen. Sessions as a punching bag.”

A parallel project is underway inside the Trump campaign, which has assigned two “sherpas” — a lead sherpa as well as one designated to media relations — to each Cabinet nominee, responsible for ferrying their respective nominees through the confirmation process. The sherpas in turn report to senior members of the Trump team: Lead sherpas report to Christine Ciccone, a lobbyist and former Jeb Bush campaign staffer, and media sherpas to senior advisers Jason Miller and Sean Spicer. Severino said she is in touch with Sessions’ media Sherpa, Keith Appell, and keeps him apprised of her efforts.

A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If the short-term goal of those inside and outside the transition is to ensure nominees aren’t excessively beaten up during their confirmation hearings, their long-term objective is to clear the runway for Trump’s ambitious legislative agenda.

Prolonged hearings over any of Trump’s nominees, even if ultimately confirmed, would eat up valuable time and effort that could otherwise be spent on creating momentum during Trump’s first 100 days.

“They want to avoid this becoming a quagmire that disrupts their ability to pass a policy agenda,” said Steve Schmidt, who helped George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees through the confirmation process.

A senior Republican Senate aide said the party is well aware that Democrats could use time as a “leverage point” as they seek to stymie Trump’s momentum on big policy priorities.

“How much floor time, how much committee time, are we going to have to burn on these fights that precludes us from getting to our legislative agenda?” he asked.

The contours of the confirmation battles are already emerging. Pruitt and Sessions are among the most conservative of Trump’s Cabinet picks, and Democrats are likely to try to disqualify them on ideological grounds. Their well-documented conservative views also explain the willingness of Republican activists to spend money and time providing them protective cover and taking on Democrats on their behalf.

No outside effort, for example, has surfaced on behalf of Steven Mnuchin, a former Democrat and Goldman Sachs partner whose nomination to run the Treasury Department sparked controversy due to his ownership of a bank that profited from the housing crisis. His media sherpa, Tara Bradshaw, declined to comment for this article.

Pruitt has become the bête noire of the environmentalist left for his refusal to say that human activity is responsible for climate change and for leading the charge against what he has characterized as the EPA’s regulatory overreach. Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz said Democrats are “totally mobilized” to stop the nomination, while Delaware’s Tom Carper accused Pruitt of looking out for “special interests at the expense of public health.” The Sierra Club is running digital ads characterizing Pruitt as a protector of “polluters,” intended to pressure moderate Republican and Democratic senators to oppose the nomination.

Conservatives are rallying around Pruitt for the same reason liberals are vilifying him: He has refused to mouth the shibboleths of the left and, as attorney general of Oklahoma, has led the charge against what many Republicans characterize as the overreach and abuse of the agency he is now nominated to lead. “Senate Democrats now face a choice between the extreme, environmentalist left and common sense, thoughtful leadership at the EPA,” said Brian Rogers, executive director of ARSquared.

Sessions, a longtime foe of immigration reform whose nomination to the federal bench was scuttled in 1986 after he was accused of making racially insensitive remarks, is likely to face similar accusations during his confirmation hearings. The Southern Poverty Law Center slammed him last month for affiliating with organizations it identifies as hate groups and called him a “champion of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremists.”

Though Schmidt, the seasoned Bush hand, said it’s clear Democrats are “out to take a scalp,” conservative activists are working to ensure the victim won’t be ’one of their own — even if it’s ultimately one of Trump’s.

“The fact that Jeff Sessions is a consensus top priority for conservative organizations and groups that meet regularly around town, that’s gonna be helpful, and you’ll see it manifest,” said a second Trump transition aide.

