Use jQuery to check and see if div element is empty - asp.net-mvc

Question

Below is the code I'm using to place a blur event on a text box in my ASP MVC 3 view. The code works fine if #MailingState is empty, however it cannot tell if #channelName is empty.
For example, if #channelName is empty but #MailingState is not, then when I place a value in #MailingZip the getDrmTerritory Ajax call is fired off every time.
Here is the jQuery
$('#MailingZip').blur(function () {
if ($('#AlignmentM').is(':checked')) {
if ($('#MailingState').val() != "" && $('#channelName').html() != "") {
getDrmTerritory($('#MailingZip').val(), $('#MailingState').val(), $('#channelName').html());
}
}
});
and here is the HTML for the #channelName segment it is checking
<div id="channelName" class="M-display-field">
#*this will be updated via ajax from Market Segment *#
#Html.DisplayFor(model => model.Channel, new { style = "margin-left: 300px;" } )
</div>
The section mentioned in the comments is updated via another jQuery method that looks like this
function ChangeChannel() {
//this function called if Market Segment changes, to update the channel
var pendistcode = document.getElementById('Pendist');
if (pendistcode == null) alert('Error: Cannot find Market Segment control');
//alert('!pendistcode value is ' + pendistcode.value);
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: '/AgentTransmission/GetChannel/',
data: { pendist: pendistcode.value },
success: function (data) {
// alert("success: " + data);
$('#channelName').html(data);
$('#Channel').val(data);
},
error: function (data) {
alert("failure to obtain Channel name");
}
});
CheckTerritory('channel');
} //end ChangeChannel
That jQuery method (ChangeChannel) appends text to the channelName div which, when rendered with a value in it, looks like this
Here is the HTML you get when you inspect the Life Sales from that picture

Answer 1

You can check if #channelName is empty or not like this:
if ( $('#channelName').is(':empty') )
and combine with your code like this:
if ($('#MailingState').val() != "" && !$('#channelName').is(':empty'))

Answer 2

I put in an alert statment to find out channelName's length and it came back with 35, so there must obviously be some white space that gets rendered each time. I had to change the statement to the following to trim out the whitespace and add the variable to the condition.
var channel = $.trim($('#channelName').html());
if ($('#MailingState').val() != "" && channel != "")