How we vote, and how many of us vote, is the ultimate expression of our nationhood. What message, then, can we draw from the results of the November 3rd vote?

Democrats actually gained five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, dominated by conservative right-wing Republicans, and held their own in the Senate. These results are historic. You have to go back nearly 180 years to find the last time a party whose president was in the sixth year of his term gained seats in Congress in a mid-term election.

Clearly, the American people are tired of the White House sex scandal. Polls released after the election showed that 70 percent of the public, including 49 percent of Republicans, felt the GOP did poorly at the polls because of their single-minded focus on impeachment. How ironic that instead of President Clinton leaving office, it is his primary accuser, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, who was moved out.

But there is more behind the headlines in these unprecedented results. For the first time in many years, organized labor reasserted itself as a powerful influence in deciding many races. And they did it the old-fashioned way with what I call "shoe-leather politics."

Labor organizations can never outspend the business community or anti-union candidates. But they do have tremendous resources in their members. This year, more than ever before, labor turned out its members where it counted, at the polls.

Tens of thousands of union volunteers walked the streets for candidates, knocked on doors, talked to their co-workers, participated in telephone banks, contributed their hard-earned dollars, registered and voted.

More than 22 percent of all voters on November 3rd came from union households, a huge turnout in a mid-term election. According to AFL-CIO estimates, nearly half of all union households voted. Union members were the difference in many close races as they voted for labor-friendly candidates by margins of more than 70 percent.

According to the AFL-CIO, union activists in Washington State filled 45 phone banks in the weeks leading up the election. In San Diego, Calif., Communications Workers of America Local 1509 volunteers talked with all 3,000 members at the Pacific Bell facility. In Iowa, 60 percent of union members were already registered before the 1998 political season, and a large Labor '98 effort helped sign up even more members to vote. Union members made calls from 28 phone lines in the Des Moines area, and leafleted worksites such as a large Firestone plant represented by the United Steelworkers and food processing plants in the Quad Cities and Uttumwa. Union members urged one another to vote early and by absentee ballot.

In Oregon, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union contacted each of their members two to three times and many locals did their own phone banking.

Two big states which will be key to the 2000 presidential election are good examples of how this volunteer effort produced results. In New York, labor-backed Rep. Charles Schumer defeated 16-year incumbent Senator Alphonse D'Amato because union households comprised 34 percent of all voters.

In California, where labor-endorsed candidates Grey Davis won the governorship and Senator Barbara Boxer was reelected, union households comprised 22 percent of all voters.

On balance, labor's political resurgence is a positive development for our nation. Union members restore people power to an election process that has been dominated by big money for too long.

When I first entered politics many years ago, candidates had to build people organizations to win. Voting turnout was always high and citizens had a sense of influence over events.

In my last contested campaign for reelection to Congress, in 1986, there were 6,000 individual block captains with the self-assumed responsibility for turning out the votes in their residential blocks on election day. Thirty-three thousand local families displayed my signs in their front yards. I always depended on ordinary people to win.

But the cost of elections is getting astronomical. As candidates require more and more money to win, the active role of volunteers has diminished. Candidates are dependent on big financial contributors. A presidential contender, for instance, has to raise about $56,000 a day to mount a credible campaign. No wonder average citizens now feel disconnected from politics.

The message of the 1998 vote is this: shoe-leather politics still wins elections and volunteers still count.

Shoe-leather politics connects greater numbers of people to candidates, making elections a people business once again. And, today, nobody does it better than organized labor. To me, that is democracy at work.

From AIL Labor Agenda December 1998.