With time ticking on what White House aides see as their last, slim chance to get Merrick Garland confirmed before the November election — the unlikely scenario he’ll get a hearing and a vote before the Senate breaks for the summer — allies will launch new operations and ads starting Saturday to pressure GOP senators during next week’s recess.

To date, the outside allies have focused on the states with the five most vulnerable GOP incumbents (New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois) and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley’s Iowa. Now they’ll be expanding the map to cover three more incumbents up for reelection: Arizona’s John McCain, North Carolina’s Richard Burr and Missouri’s Roy Blunt.


They’re calling it the 9-9-9 campaign: nine states, over nine days, to push for a court with nine justices. (No apologies to Herman Cain, who coined the term for his 2012 tax plan.)

More and more, though, they’re going to be talking about Donald Trump, tying in Republicans’ discomfort with the largely unpopular likely Republican nominee to say that refusing President Barack Obama’s nominee amounts to enabling a would-be President Trump’s.

The plans represent an unspoken acknowledgment that the Supreme Court fight is less about actually trying to get Garland on the bench before November, and more about turning the Republican resistance into a campaign issue to maximize GOP losses in the Senate, and even in the House. The recess efforts are both a shot across the bow from Democrats, and a test run for some of what they’ll be ramping up through the fall.

Americans United for Change will be heading up the effort to track Republican senators down at town halls and campaign events, often with a collection of mobile billboards in tow, which they’ll also be driving around the neighborhoods where the senators live and have their district offices. They’ll be holding press events, some with workers like nurses and janitors saying they’d be fired if they showed up to work and did their jobs, some with business leaders and law school deans calling attention to the effects of the continued vacancy on the Court and the prospect of more 4-4 decisions, according to the group.

Other allied groups — including the Service Employees International Union, Planned Parenthood and Voto Latino — will also be organizing set events, which will include a town hall in Iowa to turn up the heat on Grassley. In Ohio, where they’re hoping to create a problem for GOP Sen. Rob Portman, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown will be leading a roundtable with mothers on the court issue, and Rep. Tim Ryan will be doing a separate press event.

All these efforts are being done in close coordination with the White House, with at least one meeting per week held at the Precision Strategies office of Stephanie Cutter, who is leading the strategic planning. Several White House aides and leaders of the top ally groups attend.

“The theory here is that the only way we break the Republicans to allow a hearing [and] to allow an up or down is to convince them their political lives are in jeopardy,” said Brad Woodhouse, president of Americans United for Change. “We’re going to beat them down politically until they fold, but if they stick to this suicide pact then we’re going to prosecute a political case that really makes them vulnerable in the election.”

The efforts don’t have a clear dollar amount behind them.

After the last recess at the end of March, Senate Republicans and their own allies gleefully pointed out that the millions of dollars spent didn’t lead to a single Republican coming out in favor of Garland. In fact, the fierce response Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran received for simply saying he was worried about the message sent by not giving Garland a vote led him to quickly recant, leaving just Illinois' Mark Kirk and Maine's Susan Collins as Republican senators in favor of moving forward with the nomination.

The White House has tried to stick to several low-key strategies for promoting Garland: a web video, last week’s brief surprise speech by the nominee at an event for judges in Washington, and careful deployments of President Barack Obama himself. On Thursday, Obama took advantage of dropping by a briefing that his press secretary was doing with college reporters to tell them that if they are going to cover national affairs, they should know "our system only works when, even when we have big disagreements, even when there are big policy disputes, there is still a willingness to follow the rules and treat people fairly, especially those who are on the other side of the debate.”

Polling on the vacancy has continued to encourage the White House and its allies, and Friday the Constitutional Responsibility Project and the League of Conservation Voters released the latest from Hart Research, showing that 56 percent of Pennsylvanians support Garland getting a hearing, with 37 percent opposed. The numbers are slightly better for Garland among independents. The poll shows that few people know incumbent Sen. Pat Toomey’s position (he’s opposed), but in an accompanying memo, pollster Geoff Garin argues that among independents, “Toomey risks turning as much as 16% of the electorate against him by joining in the Republican obstruction of Judge Garland — a decisive pool of voters in what is likely to be a closely contested election.”

“Polls show a growing potential for backlash should these senators continue to shirk their constitutional responsibilities. The more independent voters learn about these senators’ unprecedented obstruction, the more support they will lose,” said Amy Brundage, a former deputy White House communications director who’s now a spokesperson for the group they call the Constitutional Responsibility Project.

America Rising, one of Republicans’ leading outside allies on the Court fight, says there are plans to get conservatives out during the recess, including with earned media efforts around Law Day on May 1.

"The White House's multi-million dollar campaign to press GOP Senators on the Supreme Court has been an unmitigated failure," said Jeremy Adler, communications director for America Rising Squared, arguing that they've only strengthened Senate Republicans' resolve. "We hope they keep it up!"

Carrie Severino, the Judicial Crisis Network chief counsel, also declined to get into details, but promised there would be activity.

“We plan to go in the offense, holding Red-State Democrats accountable for their support of Judge Garland's nomination,” she said in a statement. “Several Democrat senators are already squeamish about backing Obama's judge who would gut the right to bear arms and green-light government bureaucrats in the EPA to destroy the local economy. We hope they will choose to stand with their constituents' interests rather than carrying water for Obama."

White House aides have been eagerly scheduling meetings for Garland with senators, hoping they can soon reach the point when a majority of the chamber has met with him and they can shift to focusing exclusively on calling for a hearing. So far, 32 Democrats and 14 Republicans have met with him, and four other Republicans have publicly committed to. (That also leaves 14 more Democrats whom the White House can shuttle him around to for the sake of keeping up media attention.)

Garland is not prepping for a hearing per se, though he does continue to meet with White House staff ahead of his meetings with senators, which often cover much of the same substance.

The White House will also soon send its completed formal nominee questionnaire to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Woodhouse says the more attention the pro-Garland forces can get for their message, the more hopeful they are that they’ll get Republicans to relent — or at least to lose.

“We’re going to lay the wood to these people on this issue,” Woodhouse said, “because the polling says it works.”