RealClearPolitics' Tom Bevan to Newsmax: 'It's Back to Being a Tight Race'

Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, told Newsmax on Thursday that with the substitution of Vice President Kamala Harris for President Joe Biden at the top of the Democrat ticket, the 2024 presidential race is competitive once again.

"It's back to being a tight race, and we got a New York Times/Siena poll, national poll, that came out this afternoon that showed it at Trump leading Harris by 1 point among likely voters," Bevan said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "In their last poll, Biden was down 6 [points] to Trump in that same poll. So, I think there's no question that this is a new race that just started and is going to last for 104 days or whatever it's going to be, is a new race, and the baseline for that is that it's back to being close in a lot of these battleground states and nationally."

Bevan explained that while "nobody would dispute that" Harris "did not do very well during the primary" in 2020, the current situation is different than running in a primary race.

"She is not running against other Democrats; she's running against [Republican] Donald Trump," he said. "He unites the party in and of himself; he's a turnout machine on both sides. And so the main concern that Democrats had, that were weighing on them and independent voters, for that matter, was Joe Biden's age and his fitness for office. That sort of came to a head in that June 27 debate, and now that she's the presumptive nominee, she's not facing any of those questions or any of those concerns. It's a completely different scenario, and she's able to step in and she has a perfect foil in Donald Trump to make partisan attacks. That's what she's been doing for the last couple of days."

Up until this point, Democrats had been facing "an enthusiasm gap," Bevan said, which has since evaporated since Biden stepped down and Harris became the presumptive party nominee.

"There just were Democrats who just were not thrilled about turning out and voting for Joe Biden," he said. "That seems to have gone as well. I mean, the one thing that we've seen there has been this sort of bump of enthusiasm and euphoria among the Democrats. They're back to being excited about turning out to vote in November. We'll see if that lasts and if they can keep up that that level of enthusiasm."

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