Republican Curtis Bashaw and Democrat Andy Kim want to push the reset button after Bob Menendez’s corruption conviction but disagreed on issues like abortion, Israel and Hamas, political corruption, and immigration in their third and final debate in their campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Kim promised to deliver for his home state.
“You deserve not performance, not theater, you deserve results, and that’s the kind of senator I’ll be for New Jersey,” Kim said.
Bashaw said he was running because “New Jersey is ready for change.”
“I don’t think we should keep sending a political insider, career politicians to represent us in Washington, like Bob Menendez or Andy Kim,” Bashaw said. “We need a new perspective in Washington to do better for New Jersey.
He said after Democrats had held both of the state’s Senate seats since 1982, it was time for a change.
“I also think we need a Republican senator down there to give it a go. We’ve been 50 years with two Democrats,” Bashaw said. “We can do better.
Bashaw maintained that the best way to avoid another corrupt senator for New Jersey is to stop career politicians from dominating the Congress.
“The founding fathers intended that citizens run for office. They didn’t necessarily intend for career politicians that stayed there forever and ever and ever, starting to look at their own interests above that of their country or their state,” Bashaw proclaimed. “This whole thing, this stench of corruption has been hanging out there for a long, long time. That’s why I believe it’s time for change, for political outsiders, not career politicians, to get engaged in this race and to win”
Kim, a three-term congressman, called for a “new era of politics.”
“We need to change course, change the trajectory, and that means we cannot just have the same old, same old politics,” the Democratic nominee said.
He criticized Bashaw for donating over $60,000 to Republican county chairs during his primary campaigns and pointed to his own lawsuit to eliminate county organization lines.
Kim smacked Bashaw for opposing New Jersey’s system of “unfair ballot design … something that was instrumental in entrenching machine politics in our state.”
“I stood up to my party. I stood up to the brokenness in our political system to be able to show that when there’s corruption, we don’t care if they’re Democrats or Republicans, we’re going to stand up against that,” he said. “And I stood up against party leaders when the unfair system of how our election did, and we were able to change Jersey politics forever.”
Kim blamed former President Donald Trump for abolishing the State and Local Property Tax Deduction, calling it a “direct attack upon us.”
“He made it very clear why he was doing this for political purposes. Not only that, where were the resources then going? He was giving huge tax breaks to the biggest corporations and the wealthiest Americans, and that’s not the priority that New Jersey families want,” said Kim. “That’s why I disagree with my opponent, Mr. Bashaw, someone who strongly supports Donald Trump, supports his agenda, someone who supported the president that put us in this position to start with.”
Bashaw punched back at that.
“You know, Congressman, I know it would be easier for you if you were running against Donald Trump. You’re not. You’re running against Curtis Bashaw,” he stated. “I think for New Jersey, it is more practical and better on these budget issues, on what we get back to have one Republican down there caucusing with Republicans to get things done for our state.”
Kim slammed Bashaw for shifting his position on abortion, supporting the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and putting the issue into the hands of individual states during the Republican primary and then campaigning as a pro-choice Republican in the general election.
“This is the problem. We don’t know what to believe,” Kim said. “What we see is just issues of opportunism rather than actual values.”
He said his belief that abortion is a constitutional right puts him and Bashaw on different sides.
“I will fight for this. I will make sure we’re engaged on this. I’ll make it a top priority,” stated Kim. “If Mr. Bashaw is in the Senate, then having put forward a Republican Senate majority, that majority will absolutely, absolutely block any effort to try to codify women’s reproductive rights in this country, and that’s what’s at stake in this election.”
Pushing back, Bashaw promised to vote independently.
“When my party is right, I will agree with it and support it, and when my party’s not right, I will stand up to it because I am Curtis Bashaw, and that is who I am, and I am pro-choice,” he said. “I think working on federal bipartisan legislation would lead us to a place of compromise where we wouldn’t have policies that enable into the ninth month. And I think that that’s a reasonable conversation to have, and also about parental consent for minor kids.
Bashaw challenged Kim’s record on immigration and suggested that the nation needs more federal immigration judges to deal with a three-million-dollar case backlog.
“This answer sounds like Washington, D.C. to me. Common sense would dictate if that’s all true, why did we have the border open for the last four years under Biden-Harris and your administrations? I mean, you voted seven times against border security measures that were common sense, and we have had maybe half a million illegals living in New Jersey,” Bashaw said. “I’m for common sense. We need to close the border, secure it., now. to illegal immigration. That’s just like locking your house at night when you go to sleep.”
Kim said he supports a secure border.
“We want to make sure that we are doing this in a comprehensive way. There’s no magic wand that we can wave,” he said. “What we don’t want is we don’t want just the toxic rhetoric attacking Haitian migrants and others in our community who are here because they’re trying to build a better life, and I hope we can all agree upon that.”
News 12 viewer Aaron Goldblatt of Bedminster asked the candidates about their support of Israel in their war with Hamas.
“Israel has a right to exist, a right to be able to defend itself. Now, what we want to make sure going forward is we think about the 101 hostages that are still held and trying to make sure that we can get them back as soon as humanly possible,” Kim said. “And that’s where I think the pressure and the priority needs to be, and the work that we need to do to try to build.”
A former White House national security staffer, Kim explained that there is “not a military-only solution.”
“The longer this war goes on, the longer the conflict stretches, the further reaches that it goes, the harder it is for us to be able to see how it is that we’re going to find a hostage deal to bring the hostages home, to be able to bring this violence to a close and try to build durable security going forward that is going to allow the people in the region, including the Israeli people, to be able to have the kind of security that they deserve, rather than these cycles of violence that we continue to see,” he stated.
Bashaw said he couldn’t tell from Kim’s answer “whether he thinks there’s a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel.”
“I believe Israel has a right to exist. It has a right not only to defend itself, but to win,” said Bashaw. “
He accused Kim of voting to recognize Iran and release the sanctions that financed Hezbollah.
“We know we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Why do we expect Israel to? I don’t see a moral equivalency between the two,” Bashaw said. “Good for Israel for getting the leader of Hezbollah. That’s important. That will move this down the field.”
Kim cited cutting the price of prescription drug costs, lowering housing costs, and helping small businesses to make New Jersey more affordable.
“This is the top issue that I hear about on the campaign trail. So many families struggling, and that’s why I’ve made it my top priority when working over the last six years,” he said. “The way I hear it is people saying it feels like death from a thousand cuts.”
Bashaw talked about his career as a businessman.
“I live by a budget,” the Cape May hotel owner said. “We cannot spend our way to prosperity. We cannot tax our way to fiscal health, and we cannot regulate our way to growth and innovation. So, I believe that we need to make sure that we stop passing trillions and trillions of dollars of spending, as if that’s going to solve inflation. That’s going to make it worse.”
News 12 New Jersey anchor Eric Landskroner moderated the debate for the U.S. Senate seat, which has been occupied since September by George Helmy, who took over after Menendez resigned.