Politics with Marc Ambinder

James Warren

James Warren is a former manager editor and Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune. An ink-stained wretch, he’s labored at the Newark Star-Ledger, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune in a variety of positions, including financial reporter, legal affairs reporter-columnist, labor writer, media writer-columnist and features editor. The Washingtonian once tagged him one of the town’s 50 most influential journalists (he thinks he was 46, the number worn by Andy Pettitte, a pitcher for his beloved New York Yankees). He’s a political analyst for MSNBC and writes on magazines and politics for the Huffington Post. A native New Yorker, he’s a happy resident of the wonderful, if ethically-challenged, City of Chicago, where he lives just north of decaying Wrigley Field with his Pulitzer Prize-winning wife, Cornelia, and their five-year-old son, Blair.

Recently by James Warren

Apr 7 2009, 6:00PM

Survey Says: Confusion

by James Warren

CHICAGO---As President Obama was meeting French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the richly elegant Palais Rohan in Strasbourg, a Stanford University political scientist confided to colleagues in a dimly-lit hotel ballroom that he still doesn't understand why polls botched Obama's defeat in the New Hampshire primary 15 months earlier.

 "They were so badly off," said Doug Rivers, who also runs the research firm YouGov/Polimetrix  and who consulted for both CBS News and the Economist magazine during the 2008 campaign.

And, as weird as those New Hampshire numbers were, he reminded his tired but interested audience , "The first exit polling numbers from Virginia" on election day "showed Obama with a 32-point lead."

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