At least 14 Supreme Court justices have been confirmed during election years
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/13/10987692/14-supreme-court-confirmations
One of the biggest political arguments of 2016 will be whether the Senate should confirm President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court — or delay until 2017 so that the next president can fill the seat. Already, partisans on both sides are readying their arguments about why it would — or wouldn't — be unprecedented for the Senate to run out the clock on Obama's presidency.
A key part of the conservative argument will be that it's unprecedented for the president to nominate a candidate during an election year. "It’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year," said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Saturday.
Igor Volsky, a staffer at the liberal Center for American Progress, responded with a tweet listing justices who have been confirmed in election years:
Oliver Ellsworth, 1796
Samuel Chase, 1796
William Johnson, 1804
Philip Barbour, 1836
Roger Taney, 1836
Melville Fuller, 1888
Lucius Lamar, 1888
George Shiras, 1892
Mahlon Pitney, 1912
John Clarke, 1916
Louis Brandeis, 1916
Benjamin Cardozo, 1932
Frank Murphy, 1940
Anthony Kennedy, 1988...
Liberals, of course, will argue that this shows it would be unprecedented for Senate Republicans to refuse to confirm Obama's choice for the Supreme Court. But notably, 13 out of those 14 nominations occurred prior to World War II. That's significant because American politics — particularly the politics of the Supreme Court — has changed a lot in recent decades. For most of the 20th century, the major parties were not as ideologically polarized as they are today, and Supreme Court nominations rarely led to protracted political fights. The fact that election-year nominations were common during this period doesn't seem to say all that much about the situation today.
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