Shortly after the McCain-Feingold bill passed Congress in 2002, the smart money was all on the big money: Mega-wealthy donors to the new “527s” would dominate the new political era just as they had dominated the last. Sure enough, such progressive donors as George Soros did make huge contributions to the 527s. But the smart money was wrong: The 527 era has turned out to be one of renewed grass-roots activism and small-donor participation. Groups like America Coming Together (ACT) ended up inspiring an intense devotion among their activist cadres. Partly that was due to the magnitude of their achievement; by the campaign's conclusion, ACT had raised a stunning $135 million, placed 45,000 paid staffers in the field, worked urban black and other core Democratic communities with a regularity and intensity not seen since the death of the big-city machines, and persuaded millions of battleground state residents to vote for John Kerry. But for two ACT activists whom I met in the organization...

No union leader disputes Sweeney's success in turning around labor's political program. In last month's election, 59 percent of the union household vote went to Kerry. In Ohio, Kerry got the votes of 66 percent of AFL-CIO union members, up from the 62 percent Al Gore won four years earlier. The problem is that the number of union members in Ohio, and in the United States, has been dwindling as manufacturing has tanked. In 1992 just 19 percent of voters in the presidential election came from union households. By 2000 that figure had risen to 26 percent, chiefly as a result of the hard work of the AFL-CIO's political program. By last month, though, the share of union households in the electorate had declined to 24 percent. With a scant 8 percent of private-sector workers belonging to unions -- the lowest level in nearly a century -- even the most brilliant political program can no longer be counted on to produce Democratic majorities. In matters of elections, or winning contracts that...