first democrat to be elected governor in nearly 45 years. with me now to take a closer look at all of this, msnbc national political correspondent, steve kornacki at the big board. nbc news correspondent rahema ellis is in new jersey. and larry sabato, the director of the university of virginia s center for politics. thank you for being with me. steve, let s start with you. what s the latest from new jersey? here we go. all eyes are on the garden state right now. you see phil murphy, the democratic incumbent. he leads here by just under 6,000 votes, 0.2 of 1% over jack ciattarelli, his republican opponent. look, the bad news for murphy is this was a state that obviously joe biden, as you say, won in a landslide. it s a state that republicans really struggled to be competitive in. and nobody thought this race was even going to be place. i think the suspense both democrats and republicans talking to in the last week felt, hey, is this maybe going
can tweet, they can talk on social media. but one day a year, you get to vote, the people have spoken. it s why protecting and preserving voting rights is so important. that wraps up this hour. i m stephanie ruhle. thank you for watching. stick around all day. jose diaz-balart picks up breaking news coverage right now. good morning. it s 10:00 a.m. eastern, 7:00 a.m. pacific. i m jose diaz-balart. at this hour, we continue to follow all of the election results. votes are still being tallied in the new jersey governor s race. unexpectedly locked in a dead heat. this after republican businessman glenn youngkin was elected to become virginia s next governor, in a state president biden won by ten points just a year ago. also this morning, a historic step in the fight against the pandemic. for the first time, kids ages 5 to 11 are getting their first dose of the covid vaccine. we ll talk to a pediatrician about the significance of this
i m hearing it on the street corners here in hoboken, people do not like it, the impact that it was having on small business with all of the mandates and the shutdowns. so they were voting for ciattarelli. they also were saying, some, that they didn t like the way that murphy was essentially saying, if you like the way things are going right now, don t change anything. you don t want to change captains when this boat is moving down the river. well, apparently, there were a lot of people here in hoboken and throughout new jersey who are not in favor of the way, the direction that the boat was going. that s how they explained this tight, tight race we had when the polls closed and why we re still looking at some counting being done now. a lot of people are questioning, why is there so much confusion and why are we seeing so many ballots still being counted here we are the day after the election. jose? thank you, rehaima. meanwhile, chris, republicans have already won two of the three
now children are getting the coronavirus. congresswoman, you say that democrats are not going far enough. what more do you think needs to be done? what more needs to be done is we need to get these bills passed. we need to get infrastructure passed. we need to get the child tax credit done for our families that are struggling. we need to get kids in school. the kindergarten portion of the bill is so big for districts like mine, and just because we lost, you know, this one gubernatorial race yesterday, look at california, where republicans failed miserably at the recall, on the same issues. the difference in california was that we were focused on the message and what we were delivering. and i think that that is what democrats need to be engaged in, all of us. not just a few of us.
to be a single-digit race? well, it s a lot more than a single-digit race. that s the bad news for murphy. the good news for murphy the vote, it seems to be coming in. the remaining vote that s out there, we re still seeing big batches or significant batches specifically of vote by mail. it looks like a lot of these counties waited until the end to count up the mail ballots. the mail ballots are the most democratic friendly, the most murphy friendly. so you see murphy s got the lead now. if you were watching in the last six to eight hours, he was slowly inching towards ciattarelli s number. he s now above ciattarelli s number. one big one i know we are waiting on is right here in mercer county. this is a pretty good-sized county, where trenton, the state capital is. you can see it s a democratic county. and we are waiting on a couple of things here. one is the vote by mail. so that vote by mail in mercer county, you expect to just be overwhelmingly democratic in murphy. get a lot of vo