WRT SCOTUS nominees, Trump has one signal advantage - the fact that he ran on a platform of nominating people from an explicit list of candidates. That was a promise to those who supported him, and a threat to those who would support Hillary. A two-edged sword at the time. If any one of those candidates had proved to be a juicy political target, the Democrats could have, and would have, bludgeoned Trump politically over it. But they didn’t.Now that Trump has won, that list is an insurance policy. The Democrats have a tradition of arbitrarily claiming that any Republican nominee for SCOTUS is “out of the mainstream.” Well, the terms of 25 Democrat senators - over half of all incumbent Democrat senators - expire in 2018. Ten of those Democrats hail from states won by Trump; five from states Trump won by over 18%. The Senate Democratic caucus is going to be a bit tentative about calling a nominee from Trump’s list of candidates for SCOTUS “out of the mainstream.”
That dog won’t hunt at all in states where Trump won. And probably not all that well elsewhere. Chuck Schumer may find that, coming from deep-blue NY, he is out of the mainstream on that issue.
Schumer will let those 5 vote yes, and a couple of the others. He just needs 40 votes to win a filibuster.