There never was much chance that the Rs would let any Obama nominee through this year. Oh, I guess if Obama nominated the sitting president of the Federalist Society, someone clearly worse than JEB or Rubio would send up, sure, then maybe they would have been happy to take advantage. But, no, they were never going to confirm anyone Obama would actually want on the court.
The expected, pragmatic, way for them to have gotten this done would have been a combination of slow-walking any Obama nomination, then voting it down after running out the clock as much as possible. They would only have had to shoot down two at most before it became really too late to consider a third. (The timing question would have made the dynamics different if the vacancy had occurred a year earlier. Swing voter public opinion wouldn’t let them get away with a lengthy string of vote downs, as opposed to the one or two that gets them home free at this late date.) Because they hold the majority, they could have let any of their "moderates" who needed to for electoral reasons vote to confirm, and still had a majority to deny confirmation. Because the Ds failed to nuke the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees, they could have let an even bigger chunk of their caucus vote "yes" and still torpedoed it. If anything, having several R Senators vote to confirm would let them pretend to be reasonable and moderate as a party, in a situation where they actually had the partisan work of scuttling any Obama nominee in the bag.
Instead they gave our side this bonus. They made the unforced error of issuing categorical statements that they would do what they would have done anyway, but could have done while preserving the outward show of normal, statesmanlike conduct. Instead they chose to get the same result in a way that involved showing us all that they belong in the monkey house.
Our side's response, all too predictably, was to attack them in order to win this news cycle we're in today. Okay, sure, there are signs that our attacks are working, in that there starts to be talk on their side of backing off the categorical refusal approach. But that categorical refusal of theirs was a mistake. We're just helping to nudge them back to their much better strategy of killing any Obama nomination by slow walk and vote down, rather than categorical refusal to do their part in governance. By the time the only news cycle that counts, the one that encompasses election day, has arrived, their original mistake will be long forgotten by any voter who wasn't going to vote for us anyway.
Of course Obama should do exactly what he's doing now, proceed with his part of the process and nominate someone to replace Scalia. That's substance, our side stays on course with that.
But whatever messaging our side is going to do needs to be aimed like a laser to one point only. What are the consequences if the R theory that the next president is the one who gets to make the nomination? If Obama is to be denied naming the Scalia successor by the theory espoused by all the R candidates and their Senate leader, that means the next president gets to do that. All the Rs tell us quite confidently that the next president will be an R. Practically, the question should be asked of all the R candidates to be that next president, "Who is your pick for the Scalia seat?".
Of course they don't want to talk about that. They especially don't want to talk about that until they have settled on their candidate, because as long as they are still fighting to be their party’s candidate, none of them can afford to be outflanked on the Right on this (or any) question. The bidding on who succeeds Scalia would start with Roy Moore, and not end until their consensus pick was some bathroom idiot JP in Texas who has come out publicly for stoning the gays. THAT would still be changing votes all the way to election day.
One side doesn't get to force questions the other side doesn't want to answer except under certain conditions. Sometimes external events will make a question unavoidably important. Scalia's unexpected departure is an example. Who the next president would pick to sit on the Court suddenly became a question that is harder to evade with generalities.
But you never get the other side dead to rights forced to answer questions they don't want to answer unless the other side itself forces the issue. That's what they've done here by elevating the replacement of Scalia up from the rather obscure and (to most voters) uninteresting inner workings of the Senate, to some ideological issue. They could have done down any Obama nominee in the shadows of Senate cloakrooms, but chose instead to spout off for the cameras about the world historic and sacred absolute necessity for one of them to make the appointment instead of Obama.
Look at it from another, related, perspective. Without prompting at all by our side, several of them made part of their argument the idea that fidelity to Scalia's ideology requires a true believer conservative president to name his successor. It's as if in Cruz's mind at least, there's a sort of Whack Job Seat on the Court, that we have to set aside a place for at least one bitter vicious old crank. The guy's not in his grave yet, so no way could our side get away with taking the initiative on pointing out what an extremist whack job the man has always been, but instead our folks in public office have had to bend over backwards to pretend he was some sort of deep thinker, respected even if you disagreed with him, etc. And then, once the decent interval for mourning is over, had the Rs not made Scalia’s ideology an ongoing issue, we couldn't have made it an issue, because by then it would have been ancient history. What a gift to be able to segue right into the discussion of just what it will mean to have another Scalia replace him, without having that seem as if we were disrespecting the dead, and then digging up ancient history.
That’s where we need to focus, on who the Rs will name to replace Scalia. Get them in a diving contest to see how low they can go, how ultra-Scalia they can go. The only lasting impression we leave the swing voter by focusing instead on how mean the Rs are for not letting our side nominate the successor, is that we’re weak whiners. The question of who the Rs will name, or, as it would quickly become once made an issue among them — Who Would Jesus Nominate? -- that’s the gift that will keep on giving right up to e-day, and it’s a question they get to evade if we let them slink off to their best strategy, slow-walk and vote down.
The media isn’t going to do the work for us. They’re already off to the next shiny object — Who Will Obama Nominate? That doesn’t help at all. That’s just another horse race, and it renormalizes the R’s monkey house behavior by pretending that they are once again going to play by the civilized rules of considering whomever Obama nominates. Only malicious intervention is going to get the monkey house back to flinging poo, back to Who Would Jesus Nominate?