It’s still uncertain, though, whether a yes or no vote on Kavanaugh will be influential among voters in red-state Democrats’ reelections. Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, told me that taking a hard line against Kavanaugh could make it more difficult for those Democrats, because their strategy isn’t purely focused on turning out the base. But Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who founded the political-forecasting website Crystal Ball, argued that red-state Democrats “aren’t getting but a handful of Republican voters in any event.”