In the early years of television news, election nights were a time of grudging homage to the lords of the printed 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-Journal 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 Mitofsky.
For me, the turning point in the status battle of the media—a turning point which Warren more than anybody else brought about—came on election night, 1976. My wife, Susan Morrison, 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 called Mississippi, leaving Carter five votes short. And, until Warren gave his blessing, 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 of 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 colleagues. 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 horserace 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 subsamples with an N of 30. Or those who snuck around the studio on election nights, read numbers off computers, and then notified their sources on Capitol 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 classic documentary on the ‘92 campaign, showed James Carville hollering across the room to George Stephanopoulos that Sam Popkin 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. Since this was the year in which Warren was making the calls for all the networks, Tom Brokaw, as well as Dan Rather (and very likely Peter Jennings) 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 was devoted to the benighted state of Washington. But, as time went by, 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 in 2005, no one would have been surprised by the Hamas upset. Warren would have taken one look at all those multimember 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 he would have known the outcome before the polls even opened.
Others have written or spoken of Warren’s compassion, and there was much of that to speak and write about; but for many of us who worked beside him on election nights and on so many stories before and after, what we cherished most was that sense of empowerment which his craft and his zeal bestowed on us. While today’s bloggers, in their gaseous multimillions, lust after the power famously ascribed by Spiro Agnew to “a small and unelected elite,” those of us in network news now mourn the passing of the man who, as much as anyone, made us the unrivaled force in our country’s politics that once upon a time we truly were.
Martin Plissner joined the CBS News Election unit in 1963 and became the network's political editor and later executive political director from 1970 through 1996. He is the author of The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2000).