OPINION — Watching Christine Blasey Ford’s harrowing testimony, it seemed clear that either Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination goes down or he will take the entire Republican Party with him.

Women of all political persuasions — and a hell of a lot of men — will be remembering this hearing when they go to the polls in 2018 and 2020. And while it is dangerous to overexaggerate the political influence of a single event in our hyper-partisan times, Thursday’s testimony has the potential to be seismic.

It wasn’t even what Ford said — though her repeated recollections of Kavanaugh laughing during the alleged sexual attack were haunting — so much as her mixture of composure and emotion as she said it. This was a wrenching event in her life and she had no hesitation in testifying that Brett Kavanaugh was one her two sexual assailants.

Every strategic decision that the Senate Judiciary Republicans made accentuated the power of her testimony. Normally, a she-said-he-said confrontation over factual events leaves everyone with an open mind having doubts about the truth. That obviously was the GOP theory in refusing to allow any other witnesses other than Ford and Kavanaugh.

But it backfired when Ford seemed so compellingly honest, so desperate to be helpful, so certain of the core of her accusations. Any other witness — even Kavanaugh’s accused wingman Mark Judge — would have distracted from the clarity of Ford’s words.