We should remember that we were never going to win this
Democratic senators went into these hearings expecting to lose. Without a majority voice on the committee, all they could do was fight the good fight and decry standard-issue Republican corruption: hiding documents, refusing to follow up on questionable statements made under oath, etc. Booker's Spartacus moment was great red meat for the election, but I don't think any serious observer believed it would flip Republican senators, or even conservative Democratic ones. Really, all we had was the remote hope that both Collins and Murkowski would get cold feet at the specter of Roe being overturned. But even that was a near-impossible scenario because 1) Collins never really cared about Roe, she only cared about appearing to care; and 2) Kavanaugh has a relatively clean record on Roe for a right-winger (his comment about it not being "settled law" because the court can reverse itself is technically correct and doesn't really speak to how he would vote).
This was a done deal until Christine Ford came out of the woodwork and changed the game. Suddenly, we weren't just talking about Republican political misbehavior but about whether this guy was fundamentally fit to sit on the bench -- any bench. In hindsight, though, despite changing the game, Ford never really had a shot at winning it.
Consider: the FBI only interviewed six people, and one of them claimed that Ford's friend had contacted her to "clarify" her statement. The friend who allegedly did that was the same FBI agent that Ford's supposed ex-boyfriend claimed Ford helped coach to pass a polygraph. So right away we've got this ex-boyfriend's letter to the committee trashing Ford, and now we've got Ford's friend allegedly tampering with one of the witnesses. Is there an honest explanation for all this? Sure. Was Kavanaugh's crew doing the same kind of stuff? Yup. Are any of these people lying? Maybe, but then again, maybe Ford is too. The FBI investigation was a joke, but even if it hadn't been, any prosecutor will tell you that a case built solely on the testimonies of the victim and a web of secondary, circumstantial witnesses is a shit sandwich. Accounts conflict, people misremember, all kinds of credibility issues and ulterior motives pop up -- problems that are magnified to the nth degree when the event in question took place almost 40 years ago. It's likely that a more thorough investigation not only would have helped corroborate Ford's story, but also would have turned up even more stuff that Republicans could use to discredit her.
So Ford was in a situation where a majority of the jury *wanted* to disbelieve her, it was almost impossible for her to prove her case, she had witnesses saying things that undermined her, and she also faced the biggest problem of all: this happened in high school. Anita Hill's claims were about Thomas' behavior when he was already a judge. That went right to his professional fitness. But most people want to believe that their bad behavior from high school shouldn't follow them into their fifties. For most of us, that means things like doing drugs and wearing hideous clothes. But even something as bad as drunkenly holding a girl down and trying to pull her clothes off falls into the category of "bad shit from childhood" for many middle-aged people. I've heard comments like this in more than a few conversations; it really strikes a nerve with people. It's not misogyny per se, they just don't like feeling that high school mistakes could suddenly ruin their lives when they're approaching retirement age.
The bottom line is there was never any plausible scenario where Ford won and Kavanaugh lost (outside of the White House withdrawing his nomination for PR reasons). And while that's tragic, it put us right back where we started: facing a battle we knew we were going to lose but had to fight anyway. On the bright side, Kavanaugh will be as damaged as any Supreme Court justice we've ever had. He's facing perjury investigations and potential impeachment votes and he hasn't even reached the court yet.
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