The New Jersey Globe and Rider University host the debate at 7 p.m. on Sunday 27 September. David Wildstein and Micah Rasmussen moderate. It runs 90 minutes in person, and it will stream on the Globe, Facebook, X and YouTube, as well as airing on C-SPAN.

The district runs across six counties, from Sussex and Warren in the northwest down to Union in the east. That spread is why her six-debate challenge had a logic beyond theater. A candidate who is unknown in four counties cannot fix that with one appearance in a fifth.

Bennett wanted five more. In July she challenged Tom Kean Jr. to a debate in each of the district’s six counties, which are Hunterdon, Morris, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren. Kean agreed to the one. An InsiderNJ column this week summed the outcome up in its headline: one and done.

That refusal is itself part of her message, and it is the frame she has used since the spring.

We wrote about this race five days ago, after the first independent poll put Bennett ahead 47 to 42 and Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved the seat to Leans Democratic. Two things have happened since.

The New Jersey State Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association switched its endorsement to Bennett last week. The union represents more than 6,000 firefighters, emergency medical technicians and dispatchers, and it has crossed party lines in this district before. It backed Kean in 2020, Tom Malinowski in 2022, then Kean again in 2024. Now it has moved to the Democrat.

Kean’s answer was about service rather than endorsements. Asked how he would keep rank-and-file firefighters after their leadership left him, he told the New Jersey Globe that he does his job every day and focuses on the constituents he was sent to represent. That is the incumbent’s version of the same argument Bennett makes against him, which is that showing up is the measure of the job.

The first thing is how she uses the Navy. Bennett flew helicopters for more than a decade and served as an aircraft commander. She later served as an officer in the Air National Guard. Her campaign counts more than fifteen years in uniform. Yet the poll we covered last week credited her lead to household costs and to Kean’s own standing, not to any of that.

So the debate is a test of a pattern this site keeps finding. Veteran Democrats introduce themselves with service and then argue about prices. If Bennett does that on Sunday, it will be the third campaign in a month where we have watched the same division of labor, after Arizona’s sixth and North Carolina’s first.

The second thing is whether Kean defends his absence directly. He was away from Congress for months this year, and later said he had been receiving treatment for depression. Kyle Kondik of the Crystal Ball judged that the silence hurt him more than the treatment would have. A debate is a bad place to be asked about it and a worse place to dodge it.

There is also a veterans’ question neither candidate has been asked in public. Last week the discharge petition for the Major Richard Star Act reached 218 signatures, which forces a House vote on pay for combat-injured veterans once members return. Five Republicans signed it. One of them is Jeff Van Drew, from New Jersey’s second district. Kean is not on the list, and in a district with a Navy pilot on the ballot that is an obvious question for a moderator.

The third is the register. Bennett is a first-time candidate facing a man whose father was governor and whose name has been on New Jersey ballots for decades. Challengers who go too hard in a first debate look small. Challengers who go too soft stay undefined, which in her case is the actual problem.

This district is not naturally Democratic. It holds about 17,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, and Trump carried it by a point in 2024. Kean won it that year by five. What has changed is the year around him, and Mikie Sherrill carried the district by two points in last November’s race for governor.

Kean’s own coalition is the thing being tested. He won in 2022 by unseating a Democratic incumbent, then won again in 2024 while running ahead of the top of his ticket. Both wins depended on voters who split their ballots. The firefighters’ switch is one small sign that some of those voters are available this year, and the September poll is a larger one.

Those numbers explain why one debate matters more here than in a safe seat. Bennett needs crossover voters who have voted for Kean before, and the firefighters’ switch is a small piece of evidence that some of that coalition is movable. Union endorsements do not deliver members automatically. They do signal where a swing bloc’s leadership thinks the district is heading.

We have argued that a service record helps Democrats mainly by taking attacks off the table, and that it rarely wins the argument on its own. Sunday could complicate that. If Bennett leads with the Navy and the next independent poll shows her lead growing among voters who did not know her, we would have to allow that the biography is doing more work here than the crosstabs suggested last week.

If instead she spends the night on costs and Kean’s absences, and her numbers hold, the reading we published on 18 September stands. The record gets her a hearing. The prices get her the vote.

Ninety minutes is also a long format for a House race. It leaves room for follow-up questions, which is where prepared answers tend to come apart. Bennett spent her career in the Navy and then in health care management, so detail should favor her. Kean has the advantage of four years of votes to point at, and of a name New Jersey voters have known for decades.

There is a further reason to watch how she handles the Navy question. Republicans have not attacked her service, and there is no sign that they intend to. That is the quiet part of our argument, because the advantage of a service record often shows up as an attack that never happens. It is real, it is hard to measure, and a debate is one of the few places where you can watch for it.

Sunday is the last scheduled moment when both of them answer the same question. Either way, one debate is thin evidence. We will treat it as a data point, not a verdict, and we will say which way it pointed.