ASSOCIATED PRESS Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to revamp the federal circuit courts. But they'll need a second Trump term to really tilt the balance.

After two years of confirming President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees at warp speed, Republicans just hit a new milestone: They flipped the balance of a U.S. circuit court from a Democratic-appointed majority to a GOP-appointed majority.

When the Senate voted last week to put Paul Matey into a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, he became its third Trump judge and its seventh Republican pick. Those seven judges named by GOP presidents now outnumber the six judges on the 3rd Circuit named by Democratic presidents.

We’ve spilled a lot of ink at HuffPost about the judges Trump is getting confirmed ― in terms of their sheer numbers (he’s had more circuit judges confirmed by this point in his first term than any other president), their incompetence and their professional backgrounds (they are overwhelmingly young, anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-voting rights ideologues).

But where is all this headed? How different will the judiciary look by the end of Trump’s first term? A closer look at the circuit court seats that the president has filled or could fill suggests that he won’t get to replace as many Democratic-chosen judges with his conservative picks as he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) might have hoped.

Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, crunched the numbers on this in December and found that 19 of Trump’s 29 circuit judges were replacing judges selected by other Republican presidents. HuffPost updated his numbers: 24 of the 36 circuit judges Trump has confirmed so far have replaced Republican picks.

What about the circuit court vacancies that Trump could still fill in his first term? Wheeler found in December that nine of 16 current and announced future vacancies were filled by Republican-chosen judges. HuffPost updated his numbers: Five of 10 current and future vacancies were or are still filled by Republican-chosen judges.

In other words, despite Trump’s filling circuit court vacancies like there’s no tomorrow, he’s mostly replacing older Republican-appointed judges with younger ones. And there’s no reason to believe that Democratic-appointed judges will voluntarily create a wave of vacancies over the next year and a half for Trump to fill. That means the current balance of GOP-vs.-Democratic-appointed judges on these courts isn’t likely to look much different by the end of Trump’s term.

“Obviously how that plays out depends on how many more vacancies occur, especially vacancies in seats held by D-appointees,” Wheeler said in an email. “I don’t anticipate many.”