When I heard the news that Walter Shapiro, one of our long-time columnists here at Roll Call, had died, the first thought I had was: Man, Walter is really going to be bummed about not covering the rest of this election.

In 2016, when I was first getting to know him after he started writing for Roll Call, what struck me was that even as he was covering his 10th presidential campaign, he never lost track of how unpredictable elections, and reporting on them, could be.

Recalling his getting it wrong about Walter Mondale’s “unassailable” lead in polls in New Hampshire in 1984 before getting whomped by Gary Hart, he wrote: “This slavish worship of the latest poll numbers obscures the reality that primary and caucus voters make up their minds at their own convenience — and not according to the dictates of impatient pundits. … But TV ratings are not boosted by anyone displaying uncertainty about poll numbers and expressing humility before the voters. These days, the only three words that pundits can’t say on television are ‘I don’t know.’ Print and online publications get clicks by ballyhooing the latest poll numbers, no matter how meaningless. Nobody is going to headline a story, ‘Trump Leads In New National Poll with Little Predicative Value.’”

He wrote with clarity about what he did know at the time tempering it with what he did not, and with an alacrity of style that belied the sometimes heavy topics of the future of democracy or the U.S. tax code.

I never took a class with Walter, but I can’t help but think that kind of humility was a part of his charge to his students, most recently at Yale University, and his work at organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice.

In a career covering, and engaging, in politics that spanned more than half a century, Walter never lost his analytical edge, his sharp writing skills or his good-natured but lacerating wit.

His last Roll Call column, which ran July 9, took President Joe Biden to task for refusing to acknowledge at the time the reality of his dire campaign status and threat to Democrats’ electoral prospects: “Little that Biden has done since the most disastrous debate in American history should reassure anyone who wants to defeat Trump in November. Yes, the president was fierce in an 18-minute call into MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ on Monday as he denounced ‘the elites in the party — Oh, they know so much more.’ But it is a strange position when an incumbent president suddenly announces he’s the Great Outsider.”

An unapologetic realistic liberal (a rarity, but not an impossibility), Walter’s political acumen was earned not just in his decades writing for every outlet from Congressional Quarterly to USA Today to the New Republic, but from his own experience working in the electoral and campaign process.

In 2022, he wrote about his unsuccessful 1972 run for Congress in Michigan, in which he ran on an anti-Vietnam War platform that appealed to his base in Ann Arbor (he went to the University of Michigan) but lost on bread-and-butter local issues in nearby Livonia: “During the summer of 1972, the dominant story in close-in Detroit suburbs like Livonia was court-ordered busing across district lines. I unequivocally supported busing, which was the orthodoxy opinion in Ann Arbor, a city too far from Detroit to be covered by the court order. Mine was a theoretically admirable position, but it caused me to lose Livonia by a 10-to-1 margin. That was the difference — even though I carried Ann Arbor in a landslide.”

The title of that piece — “A bike, a suit and a dream: How I lost a race for Congress 50 years ago” — reflected his self-awareness and willingness to poke fun at himself. And in addition to that run, he also served as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, giving him a frontline place in a truly dynamic and trying time in U.S. history.

A veteran of covering 11 presidential campaigns, he also never lost his attention to the minutiae of local and state politics that he knew from that 1972 campaign shaped the national trends.

In a Roll Call podcast Walter and I did in 2017 about an upcoming vote on the tax-cut bill that is among Donald Trump’s most tangible legacies, he expounded about the risks that Northeastern Republicans were taking in supporting a package that would whack the state and local tax deduction that constituents in their high-tax states relied on to reduce their overall tax burden.

“I understand why it’s a big way of raising revenue in the tax bill, so I understand the appeal. But I can think of nothing more likely to jeopardize the Republican House majority in 2018 than passing this legislation,” he told me on The Big Story, the predecessor to the Political Theater podcast. Republicans lost the House majority in 2018, with heavy losses in New York and New Jersey.

I am really going to miss him. He was a font of both wisdom and knowledge, and was a blast to be around.

As for those of us in the political press corps whom he leaves behind, I cannot improve on what he wrote in another recent column, “Ten rules for understanding the 2024 elections.” It is classic Walter, never wavering from what he described as a worthy and noble calling — nor losing track of how fun, infuriating and absurd the whole enterprise could be.

In a nutshell, and in his own words: “Be wary of polls, don’t overreact and make sure to check your deodorant.”