WASHINGTON – In February 1988, mere months before a contentious presidential election, the Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy as a new Supreme Court justice after his nomination by President Ronald Reagan.

The Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats, voted 97-0 to approve the Republican president's nominee during his final year in office. Among those voting in favor was Mitch McConnell, a GOP freshman from Kentucky.

Nearly 30 years later, in 2016, McConnell seemed to take a different view when he blocked Democratic President Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, saying voters should be able to express their views at the ballot box before the Senate votes in the final year of a president's term.

The move paid off when Republican Donald Trump in 2017 appointed conservative Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat vacated by Antonin Scalia's death that Obama wanted Garland to fill, solidifying the court's conservative bent.

Then this week, McConnell appeared to zigzag once more, enthusiastically backing the idea of confirming a Supreme Court nominee picked by President Donald Trump should a vacancy open up 2020, the year Trump will be seeking re-election.

McConnell's reasoning? Both the White House (which nominates judges) and the Senate (which confirms them) are of the same party: Republican. It was a point he raised in 2016 though not his main one.

McConnell: Trying to leave a conservative legacy through judicial appointments

Democrats, already fuming over the Garland snub, accused McConnell of hypocrisy and said he was bending the rules for political advantage.

On Fox News Sunday in October, McConnell said that 1880 "was the last time a vacancy created in a presidential election year on the Supreme Court was confirmed by a Senate of a different party than the president."

The 1988 vote in favor of Kennedy was the last time a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House voted to confirm a nominee for the high court in an election year.

The October statement on Fox New Sunday was one in a series in which McConnell, now in his sixth year as Senate majority leader, has appeared to move the goalposts on what he has described as the principles that should guide the timing of Senate votes on Supreme Court nominees.

His more recent shift came Tuesday, when McConnell told a business group in Kentucky that he would not hesitate to help Trump fill a Supreme Court opening if one materialized in 2020, when the president is up for re-election.

The strategy, which McConnell reiterated in a fundraising email hours later, seemed at odds with what the Republican Senate majority leader said in 2016 when discussing why he did not plan to take up Obama's nomination of Garland.

“It’s clear that concern over confirming Supreme Court nominations made near the end of a presidential term is not new," McConnell said on the Senate floor in February 2016, nearly a month before Obama chose Garland to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia.

"Given that we are in the midst of the presidential election process ... I believe that it is today the American people who are best-positioned to help make this important decision – rather than a lame-duck president whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election.”

When pressed in October on the difference between 2016 and now, McConnell said it was because currently, the same party – the GOP – controls both the White House and the Senate.

Asked about the 1988 vote on Kennedy, McConnell's spokesman, David Popp, said there was no inconsistency because Reagan nominated him in November 1987, weeks before the presidential election cycle officially began.

The Senate vote, however, took place in the same year as the election.

And while nominating contests begin early in the election year with caucuses and primaries, candidates begin campaigning far before the first votes are cast. In 1987, for example, George H.W. Bush had announced his candidacy the month before Reagan nominated Kennedy. The Democrat he would defeat, Michael Dukakis, announced his candidacy in April 1987.