The massive AFL-CIO headquarters sits on Sixteenth Street in Washington, DC, only about 100 yards or so from the White House. Nicknamed “the Marble Palace” by labor journalists, the building contains several auditoriums and its own patio. Across its lobby stretches a giant two-story mural done in a socialist realist style, depicting laborers heroically at work. On Tuesday, union activists transformed much of its interior into a massive call center in order to make Get Out the Vote phone calls to voters in Virginia — which ultimately broke for Obama 50.8 percent to Romney’s 47.8 percent.

The Marble Palace might give off the feel of a powerful, robust labor movement, bursting with resources, but the second mortgage that the AFL-CIO took out on the building in 2007 for $45 million suggests a different narrative. It tells a tale of a labor movement bleeding members and revenue. Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) needed to take out a $5 million dollar loan from the union-owned Amalgamated Bank in order to continue its efforts to keep the Senate in Democratic control.

Yet the labor movement as a whole spent an estimated $400 million electing Democrats this year, demonstrating how costly they believe a Republican takeover could have been.