Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith's victory in the Mississippi run-off election on Tuesday night will provide Republicans with 53 Senate seats, in effect giving Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., three votes to spare when it comes to confirming President Trump's judges.

With Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, Trump won't be able to pass any sort of major legislation, meaning that the Republican Senate will be primarily spending the next two years pushing through as many judicial nominations as possible.

In the past year, with Republicans down to 51 seats, McConnell has only been able to afford one defection on confirmations. That in effect has left fence-sitting Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Jeff Flake with out-sized influence over the nomination process as any two of them had the power to sink a nomination.

Going into 2019, Flake will be out of the Senate, and McConnell will be able to afford to lose both Collins and Murkowski and still have a vote to spare given Vice President Mike Pence can cast the tie-breaking vote.

The added cushion not only means that it will be easier for McConnell to get nominees confirmed, it also means that Trump and his team can have more leeway to nominate more conservative judges given that there is now less pressure to placate centrists.

Currently, there are 112 district court vacancies and 11 appellate vacancies on the federal bench. Going into this election, the Senate had confirmed 84 Trump judges.

If Trump fills all of the current vacancies, nearly one in four federal judges will have been appointed by Trump. This does not take into account any additional vacancies that could come up over the next two years. This could have a transformative effect on the judicial branch, and will likely figure heavily in the 2020 election as Trump will tout judges as a leading example of how he delivered for conservatives.

