Virginia’s looking good for the Democrats so far [UPDATED: Northam wins]

Only about 2,000 votes separate Ralph Northam and Ed Gillespie in Virginia’s governor race. Northam, the Democrat, holds the narrow lead. About one-quarter of the vote has been counted.

At FiveThirtyEight, the view is that Gillespie isn’t running well enough in comparison to Donald Trump to have much of a shot. Indeed, Northam seems to be doing better than Hillary Clinton, who carried Virginia by 5 points.

UPDATE: With almost half of the in, Northam leads by about 2 percentage points (about 50,000 votes). Normally, the Republican needs a sizable lead late in the count to withstand the Democratic surge produced by very late returns from Northern Virginia.

MORE: It seems clear that Northam is going to win his race and by a margin that exceeds Hillary Clinton’s. The focus now is going to be on the House of Delegates races where the Dems are also doing quite well.

I’m going to focus on watching basketball.

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