How many Supreme Court justices will the President confirm?

The core issue is vacancy creation, because the President can only confirm a justice if a seat opens and the Senate approves a nominee. Over the remaining term, the Court’s age profile makes one vacancy quite plausible, with Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Sotomayor all old enough that retirement or mortality risk is no longer trivial, but the bench is still stable enough that a completely empty term is far from impossible.

Once a vacancy appears, confirmation is easier than it used to be because a simple Senate majority is enough after the 2017 rules change. That said, Senate control is still a real constraint, and strategic retirement behavior matters: justices may time departures to maximize ideological continuity, which raises the odds of a vacancy when the political environment is favorable and suppresses it when it is not. That dynamic makes exactly two confirmations a live alternative, but not the most likely one.

My view is that exactly one confirmation is the modal outcome, but only modestly so. Relative to the market, I am slightly less confident in the single-vacancy path and slightly more open to both zero and two confirmations, because the current Court is old enough at the top end to produce a second opening and young enough below that a quiet finish to the term remains credible.