WARREN

Words by Marty Plissner

In the early years of television news, election nights were a time of grudging homage to the titans of the press. For us at the networks, when a race was close, Ohio or Illinois or Kentucky had spoken when the Plain Dealer or the Tribune or the Courier-Jounral hit the street – or when a spy in its pressroom leaked you the headline. And not before.

Those who worked at the networks hated that. And so God, in his wisdom, created election units. And, along the way, he gave us Warren

For me the turning point in the status battle of the media, a turning point which Warren more than anybody else brought about, came election night in 1976. My wife, Susan, who was working at the Washington Post, called and asked what the hell Warren was waiting for,. Dave Broder and Ben Bradlee were going nuts, because the final edition was about to go to press, and while NBC and ABC had already elected Jimmy Carter, Warren, wary of a potential pitfall that occurred to no one else, still had not made the call. And until he did, the nation’s presses couldn’t roll..

In taking over, for good, that night the role of defining victory in America, television had finally reached the top rung in the power of the media – and, of course, the arrogance that went with it. There too, as an exemplar, Warren was up to the task – to the delight of his cheerleaders – many of whom are in this room. Even in the modesty-challenged company of pollsters and journalists, Warren stood out.

He did not, in the words of the Apostle, suffer fools gladly. Like the suits at the Tiffany network and the paper of record who for a number of years refused to report the horse race figures in his polls – or even to let their own reporters in on them. Or the mandarins of survey research who joined review boards but were reluctant to spank their fellow pooh-bahs when the occasion warranted. . .

Like reporters who insightfully based stories on sub-samples with an N of 30. Or those who snuck around the studio election nights, read numbers off computers and then notified their sources on the hill or at the White House – often with the wrong, or premature data. Warren’s jihad against the leaking class suffered a setback, to be sure, when the “War Room,” that class documentary on the ‘92 campaign showed Carville hollering across the room to Stephanopoulos that Sam Popkin, who is with us here today, had talked to “Warren Whatever,” and there were signs of a landslide.

And then there were the purists among his peers who frowned upon Warren’s making up contests for his surveys out of thin air. One of the most memorable came at the California primary of 1992, in which Bush and Clinton were sure of landslides since the race was long over. So Warren, in his exit poll, posed a separate set of choices which included in both the Republican and Democratic primaries Ross Perot -- who defeated Bush and tied Clinton. This was the year in which Warren was making the calls for all the networks, So Tom Brokaw as well as Dan (and very likely Peter) declared the Mitofsky primary the story of the night.

As others of Warren’s countrymen have sought to make the world safe for elections, Warren devoted himself to making elections safe for exit polling. Much of that effort over the years, as many of you know, was devoted to the benighted state of Washington. But as time went buy, Warren ventured far beyond the shoreline – bringing the blessings of quick counts and exit surveys to the Philippines, Russia, Azerbaijan, Taiwan and Mexico. Had some client thought of sending him to Palestine last year, no one would have been surprised by the Hamas upset. Warren would have taken one look at all those multi-member districts in which the bad guys had only as many candidates as there were seats and the good, or the better guys had twice as many and would have known the outcome before the polls even opened..