I am particularly proud of the former and current members of the AFT who were elected to office, including Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. Harry Mitchell of Arizona, Dave Loebsack of Iowa, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Dean Heller of Nevada and Mike Arcuri of New York were all elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and add to the growing AFT presence there.

The AFT deployed nearly 500 volunteer members, retirees and staff to assist affiliates and the AFL-CIO in member education and get-out-the-vote efforts. The AFL-CIO reports that more than 205,000 union volunteers participated in this year’s unprecedented election effort, making 30 million phone calls, knocking on 8.25 million doors and reaching 14 million workers. The labor program also focused on turning out millions of infrequent voters.

And it worked. The AFT supports candidates based on the issues, not party affiliation, and large numbers of AFT-endorsed candidates won their races. Democrats secured control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. In the states, Democrats held their 14 governorships and won gubernatorial elections in six additional states. State chambers (house, senate or both) shifted from the Republican to the Democratic column in seven states.

The AFT, often working in coalitions, secured a clean sweep of defeats for treacherous ballot initiatives, such as TABOR (the so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights) in Maine, Nebraska and Oregon, and the 65 percent mandate (a gimmick to limit spending on public education) in Colorado, as well as victories for initiatives to raise the minimum wage in six states.

Getting candidates elected, as hard as it may seem, is often the easy part of the political process. The real work is legislating and governing. The issues facing the nation are difficult. Some 47 million Americans are without health insurance. Millions of Americans have had the pensions they earned stolen from them outright. America’s schools need billions of dollars to repair and modernize.

All of this must be done within the constraint of a federal budget ravaged by years of reckless tax cuts for the wealthy and the expense of the war in Iraq. The astronomical federal deficit, run up by the party that once prided itself on fiscal restraint, has hampered investment in national priorities like education, healthcare and programs that help working families. The outgoing Republican-controlled Congress this year alone cut $10.5 billion from Medicaid, which provides coverage to poor children, the elderly and disabled.

The new congressional leadership has pledged to take dramatic steps in the first 100 hours to raise the federal minimum wage, cut in half the interest rates on student loans, and allow the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for lower Medicare drug prices—all without increasing the federal deficit.

For AFT members, our next steps must be to make sure the candidates we worked so hard to elect remember the working families they now represent. Our ACE (Activists for Congressional Education) program, which resulted in productive meetings between AFT activists and their senators and representatives, must reach a new level of success. And through the AFT’s Count Me In initiative to build greater member activism, we hope you’ll get involved. Visit www.aft.org/CountMeIn.

We look forward to working with elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, to strengthen essential public services; expand access to healthcare; protect the right to union representation; and safeguard the economic security of Americans. Thanks to you, we have a great opportunity ahead.