The result is a Congress that is poised to take the country in a new direction on issues ranging from student loans to healthcare to retirement security to Iraq to raising the minimum wage.

“I’m a campaign grunt and proud of it,” says Council of New Jersey State College Locals member Arlene Schor, an adjunct professor at Kean University. With thousands of others volunteers, Schor helped to organize phone banks, walk precincts and get out the vote for Democrat Robert Menendez in the U.S. Senate race in New Jersey. These volunteers played a key role in countering opponents’ blatant efforts to turn the vote based on Menendez’s surname and the issue of immigration. “Bob Menendez co-sponsored a bipartisan bill on border security,” says Schor. “He has a track record of being an independent thinker, and we made sure people knew that.”

How much of a difference did labor make in this election? As AFT On Campus went to press, an exit poll from CNN showed that Democrats led in union households by 30 points. Among nonunion households, the electorate was split evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates for the House and Senate. Clearly, union members and their families provided the margin of victory for candidates who pledged to support workers and their voice in their workplace.

Moreover, another survey from the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates found that in House races, union voters supported Democratic labor candidates over Republicans by 74 percent to 26 percent. This margin has been growing over the past few election cycles as labor has focused intently on boosting member political activism. In other words, labor’s voice is getting stronger because of the growing involvement of people like AFT’s activists.

Take Ohio, for example, always a political bellwether state. From the governor’s race to the Senate battles to key House races, residents of the Buckeye State cast across-the-board votes for change and supported AFT-backed candidates. Leading the charge were AFT members like Kris Schwarzkopf, a paraprofessional in the Toledo public schools.

“There was real enthusiasm in this year’s election—it was building for months,” says Schwarzkopf, who notes that the voters she met on precinct walks and through phone banking seemed very attuned to the issues and the need for a new direction.

In Wisconsin, graduate employees who were in Milwaukee for an October meeting of the Alliance of Graduate Employee Locals/AFT spent a day knocking on over 1,000 doors. That effort made the difference in two close races and pushed the Wisconsin Legislature into the Democrat column. One victory was particularly sweet, says Brian Rothgery, vice president of the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association. “We defeated the legislator who introduced and pushed a bill to deny all graduate assistants in Wisconsin the right to organize.” Across the country, Democrats took control of both legislative chambers in 23 states, according to the Associated Press.

Certainly no contest loomed larger in the outcome of the 2006 election than Virginia’s U.S. Senate race. Cindy Huffman, a teacher at Norfolk’s Oceanair Elementary School was among the AFT members who worked hard to send Jim Webb to Congress. She says the exhaustive legwork that resulted in Gov. Tim Kaine’s win two years ago reaped benefits when organized labor re-mobilized this year. “It showed us that we could make a difference,” says Huffman, “that we weren’t at the mercy of the ‘old boy network’” in state politics.

Missouri, too, was a key battleground in 2006, and Claire McCaskill’s victory in the widely watched Senate race owed much to a mobilized base of labor volunteers. Among them was Andrea Flinders, a teacher in Kansas City who helped support McCaskill’s bid with phone banking and and voter outreach in neighborhoods and schools around her community.

From voter registration drives to phone banking to labor walks, AFT members across Pennsylvania were active in helping the Keystone State elect a number of new members to the U.S. House of Representatives and in ousting Republican Sen. Rick Santorum. The incumbent was soundly beaten by state treasurer Bob Casey, who was endorsed by AFT Pennsylvania.

The education connection was evident in Montana’s U.S. Senate race and the campaign waged by Democrat Jon Tester, a former public school music teacher. “Jon stayed on his message of integrity and honesty,” says Noreen Burris, an elementary school counselor and AFT member in Billings. Burris spent months working the phones and helping to run the office at the Democrat’s campaign headquarters.