Probably true. Kennedy was confirmed in an election year but nominated late the year before.
However, I wonder what is going to happen in January when the Republican President has to deal with a Supreme Court Justice and STILL try to get Congress to pass their agenda. It is going to be a very interesting 13 months. Republicans are going to have to do things in near perfection for this to work.
Republican US Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan was in his second full year of Senate service with the GOP in the minority and took up the task of stopping both SCOTUS nominations by stopping Fortas (in which event there would be no vacancy for Thornberry to fill).
As a long-time former Senate Majority Leader, now wielding the power of POTUS, LBJ knew his way around the Senate and its rules better than all but a handful of men then alive. That handful did not include Griffin but Griffin masterfully brought out facts about Fortas such as his receipt of $20,000 from a former client named Wolfson while Fortas sat as an Associate Justice of SCOTUS. The nominations were stopped by the Senate. Fortas resigned from the SCOTUS altogether and Thornberry became an historical footnote.
Harry Reid is unquestionably a nuisance. So is Obozo. Neither is LBJ. Whoever may be appointed by Obozo may not be receiving money in substantial amounts while being a sitting judge but whoever Obozo nominates will likely also not have the distinguished career as a lawyer, as a Washington insider and, to a lesser extent, as a judge as Abe Fortas.
This task of dealing with a SCOTUS appointment AND getting a "Republican" agenda passed by a likely "Republican" Congress should pose no unique difficulties so long as Senate GOP Caucus remains determined to RESIST until Obozo is gone, without wetting their depends over media criticism.
Even Trump has this right as of yesterday although plenty of us are legitimately concerned about who or what he may appoint to SCOTUS given the chance. To some of us, additionally, the "Scalia seat" is special just as Mr. Justice Scalia was special. Nominated by Ronaldus Maximus and the most brilliant and outspoken justice on the Court, Scalia's replacement will be quite unlikely to meet his extraordinarily high standard no matter who is the appointing POTUS.
My favorite scenario would be the appointment of former Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler (who might match Scalia's brilliance and wit and principle and a founder of the Federalist Society) or Northwestern University Law Professor Steven Calabresi (an ideological stalwart and co-founder of the Federalist Society) who clerked for Judge Robert Bork at the DC Court of Appeals and for Justice Scalia at SCOTUS. Both are graduates of Yale Law School.
An additional potential nominee is a woman named Lee Liberman Otis who graduated Yale undergrad and University of Chicago Law School and was professionally close to Justice Scalia as her law professor and clerked for him at the DC Court of Appeals and SCOTUS IIRC. She has been an adjunct professor at Yale Law and is a Professor at Georgetown Law Center. She played a key role in demolishing Anita Hill's attempt to derail Clarence Thomas's nomination. She is brilliant and principled. There are others out there as well unless the Chamber of Commerce is going to select SCOTUS justices.
DC Court of Appeals Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a former member of the California Supreme Court has as a drawback that she is 67 years old. She would be the first black woman on SCOTUS and was born to a family of sharecroppers in Alabama, was a single mother after the early death of her first husband, is an outspoken and scholarly libertarian with a deep understanding of the development or Marxism. She might be a good fallback nomination if things get overly contentious since she would be likely a short term appointment. I don't know her position on abortion and other social issues on which she would have to be vetted thoroughly.
We need a Senate committed to resistance and a POTUS who knows the names of potential judicial nominees like Keisler and Calabresi and Otis and Brown and many others like them.