little over an hour from now. let s bring in anderson cooper. we are now moments away from the first results in the new jersey s governor s race. i want to check in with athena jones. reporter: hi anderson. a short while ago we spoke with a member of murphy s team, they said they were in the war room checking numbers. turn out numbers are good. rain has been a concern, but the officials said we re cold front we had a strong thorough statewide campaign with tens of thousands of volunteers canvassing the state in ponchos to get out the vote. i also spoke to the donna campaign, they also said their confident. confident our voters are motivated to get to the polls kbi despite the weather. chris kissty popularity, his approval rating in the team.
right there, 76% of the vote. so far in these small counties he s either matching or slightly behind. are republicans coming out to vote? i look back at the performance four years ago and gillespie just matching in some of the small counties trailing of the performance. it could be an indication the voters aren t turning out. if you re looking at the map now and you re in the campaign you re doing what you need to do. you re looking at the map filling in roughly up to 42% of the vote, you re ahead. traditionally in virginia races the republican take the author tham lead. if you re raffle northam you re nervous because this is close but the map s filling in how you want it to. approaching half of the vote in virginia. what about new jersey? the polls are about to close within a minute or two in new jersey. remember four years ago.
rating. donald trump was at 31%. the reason is a record amount of jobs, the largest investment, 18.7 billion dollars in new capital. $6 million more than any governor in the history of the commonwealth. so here in virginia, people are very happy. we re safe, and tonight, i tell you, we re going to reject bannon. we re go to reject trump, we re going to reject ed gillespie, the campaign of fear and division. the gutter politics they ran in this campaign is not who virginians are. it s going to be a big night. we re going to sweep all three because people are happy. we re safe in virginia, and the ridiculous ads, he couldn t run on the economy, he couldn t run on education or health care, so he had to get in the gutter and run these horrible ads. he s going to get rejected tonight. donald trump is going to get rejected. he did robocalls today. steve bannon, no place for their politics. tonight, the message for democrats and the country is fear and division and hatred do not. they don t w
candidate who ran on fear and white nationalism. those are the planks of his campaign. and the question is whether or not those things have value, and if you tread in those things, can you be successful? and my concern is that those things have value, and if he wins tonight, then that s a horrible indicator for the rest of the country. fear and white nationalism? fair? i think definitely the republicans are testing something out here in this race. they re testing out the immigration issue. and whether or not, you know, people are going to be scared enough, you know, ms-13 is an issue in virginia. the question is how big of an issue is it? i think democrats make a mistake when they just dismiss that and sort of write that off to racism because i do think there are a lot of voter whose are sincerely concerned about this who aren t actually racist. i think that, you know, if ed gillespie ends up winning, what the lesson is going to be here for the republicans is that this was somethin