Want to know why Democrats won the election? Because union members and their families voted for them.

Here’s the breakdown – non union members split evenly according to the CNN exit polls 49% to each party. Union members went 64% Democratic, and 34% Republican.

This actually underestimates the case, because unions are more than half of the Democratic ground game. It’s not just that union members vote Democratic – it’s that union members work for Democratic candidates and against Republican ones. They knock on doors, they organize, they phone pool. Any decent union has a hardened corps of organizers from their day to day work, and around election time those guys fan out. They are tough, experienced, don’t fear rejection and are mostly solidly working class.

If you look at a map of the US by union membership, like the one above, what you’ll see is that it looks awfully familiar – where unions are strong, Dems win. Where they aren’t, they lose or struggle.

More After the Jump

Democratic legislators who like winning, who want to entrench a structural advantage, should do everything they can to strengthen unions and increase the number of unionized workers. Unions have been under heavy assault for decades now, both by conservative judges and by the National Labor Relations Board. The most recent offense was when the NLRB declared that nurses were supervisory workers, a ruling which if upheld by superior courts (and there is every reason to expect they will) will strip unionization from hundreds of thousands of registered nurses. You may remember what happened to the Republican Governator – Schwarzenegger attacked the nurses in California, ran into a buzz saw, and saw all of his ballot initiatives defeated because of it. Since then he’s run to the left, as a populist and moderately progressive Governator.

The problem is less the specific rulings and court decisions than it is the basis of the law they work off of – the Taft-Hartley bill, slammed through after WWII to weaken unions and destroy entirely foreman unions (which it did.) The bill needs to be repealed and I would suggest to Democrats that few things they could ever do would be more beneficial to them than doing that, and passing other pro-Union legislation such as allowing unionization by signing membership cards.

Republicans understand this sort of thing. They spent 30 years building up sustained institutional advantages. One of the most interesting things we saw in the election is that even though Republicans were clearly going down to defeat, corporations still gave more money to them. Republicans have built a sustained advantage by pandering the rich and to large corporations, understanding that they will be rewarded in turn. Democrats like Rahm, who want to shake down K-Street in turn misunderstand the situation – Democrats can’t give corporations what Republicans did. The past five years have had the highest corporate profit rates since WWII. At the same time real wages for ordinary people have stagnated or gone down and the proportion of gains going to workers is the worst in any post war recovery. That’s not an accident and Democrats, if they want to stay Democrats, can’t do the same. Even men like Rahm, Schumer and Hoyer, for all their flaws, don’t want to grind down the middle and working classes that way. And that means Republicans will keep a sustained advantage in money from large corporations for the time being.

Rather than trying to compete with Republicans on corporate giveaways and tax breaks, something Democrats honestly don’t believe in, they should look to something they do believe in – helping ordinary Americans earn a decent living. Not only do unionized workers earn more on average, but unionization raises the wages of non unionized workers as employers raise wages to something comparable in order to make unionization less attractive to their employees. And for those who believe in the free market, let me just note that nothing is more free market than negotiation, and all that unionization does is put workers on the same footing as employers – able to negotiate with the weight of an organization behind them and come to an accommodation based on what workers as a group are worth to that business. When the company honestly can’t afford the wages, as is the case in the auto industry today, unions lose their leverage.

But all of that should really be largely irrelevant. For politicians who want a legacy, the bottom line is simple. Where Unions are strong, Democrats win. Where they are weak, Democrats lose. And secure Democratic control of the Congress and House declined with union membership. This is no mere correlation, it is very hard causation.

As is usually the case, the right thing to do morally – helping unions so they can help workers – is the right thing to do from the point of view of self interest. So let’s see the end of Taft-Hartley, if not in this 2 year period (if Bush vetoes it), then as soon as possible.

Because you dances with the one who brought you, and Democratic congressmen and women were brought to their positions by union members.