How Nevada’s union power could decide the 2024 Presidential Election

In Nevada, the Culinary union’s canvassers are racing to swing the vote for Kamala Harris—can they overcome Trump’s growing working-class backing?

Of the seven swing states that will determine whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris becomes the next president of the United States, the most singular is Nevada. It is a fast-growing small state whose economy and politics are dominated by Las Vegas’s mega hotel-casinos. Fully 70 per cent of the state’s population lives in Vegas, which is why I just spent several days there.

Vegas is also ground zero for unions’ efforts to swing the election to Harris. Perhaps the largest local union of any kind in the country is Culinary Local 226 of UNITE HERE (a union chiefly of hotel workers), which has 60,000 members working as housekeepers, food servers and kitchen workers in all of the city’s massive hotels. Culinary, as it is called, is not only the largest local but also the most politically potent. This past Monday, I attended a rally of the 425 local members who (taking electoral leave, which their contract with the hotels enables them to do) will be working full-time walking precincts and speaking to registered voters on their doorsteps between now and Election Day (November 5^th).

UNITE HERE is mounting nearly comparable efforts in Arizona (in Phoenix and Tucson) and Pennsylvania (chiefly in Philadelphia). The Arizona and Pennsylvania efforts are staffed not just by local UNITE HERE members but also by members from nearby states: New Yorkers come to Philly, while Los Angelenos come to Phoenix. But Culinary is big enough and experienced enough to produce from its own members the lion’s share of what the local president, Ted Pappageorge, terms its “army.”

This army’s existence is a testament to the union’s exceptionalism. Nevada is a state with a “right-to-work” law—a euphemism that means workers can benefit from a union contract that covers them without having to pay dues to that union. Culinary is such an effective union in delivering benefits and creating a union culture, though, that virtually all of tens of thousands of hotel employees opt to belong and pay dues to the union.  

The story of this year’s election is increasingly centred on the drift of working-class voters, historically the Democrats’ base, into Donald Trump’s column. Many of those voters come from groups—particularly Blacks and Latinos—even deeper with the Democratic base. As Mario Yedidia, the national elections director, told me at Monday’s rally in Vegas, however, the fundamental challenge for Democrats in this election “isn’t Blacks and Latinos; it’s the working class.”

That challenge is certainly very real in Nevada. Despite a spate of Democratic victories in recent elections, “Nevada’s not blue; it’s purple,” says Pappageorge, referring to the colours assigned to states on American political maps (Democrats are blue, Republicans red, and can-go-either-way is purple). “We don’t really believe the polls [which show the race in Nevada effectively tied]. Trump’s people generally under-poll, and if we had an election today, I think Trump wins. But it’s not today. We’ve got three weeks to go and the Culinary army out there, going to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors and talk to hundreds of thousands of people.” In 2020, Pappageorge notes, Biden carried the state by 30,000 votes out of more than 2 million cast. This year, he says, if Harris wins, it will be by “10,000 or less.” 

Never mind that the minuscule leads and deficits that the polls show the seven swing states are all within the margin of error, says UNITE HERE’s international president Gwen Mills. In states like Nevada, she says, the outcomes will be determined by “the margin of efforts” – in this case, her own union’s efforts.

Unlike the nation’s largest unions, which spend multiple millions on media buys for Harris and other Democrats but often lack sufficient numbers of motivated members to go door-to-door and actually talk with voters, Culinary, in particular, and UNITE HERE, in general, eschew such purchases and opt for member door-knocking. At this stage of the campaign (keeping in mind that in America, campaigns last for the better part of a year) that’s probably the only way to still reach voters: Nevadans have been so inundated by political mailings and TV ads that by now they pay them no heed. Earlier last weekend, I accompanied two members of the Machinists union who were canvassing a neighbourhood. As we approached one house, a woman was ceremoniously dumping a pile of political mailings into a trashcan on the sidewalk. 

Culinary members go through extensive training to speak with potential voters. They generally start off with a brief pitch on the two economic issues of most concern to local voters – the cost of food and housing – and the differences on those issues between Harris (who’s called for cracking down on price-gouging in both areas) and Trump. In some working-class Vegas neighbourhoods, fully 40 per cent of the housing has been purchased by private equity firms, and following Culinary’s lead, Harris has ads on Vegas television in which she vows to crack down on Wall Street’s involvement in the landlord business, to the financial detriment of potential Vegas homebuyers and current Vegas renters.

On Monday, I accompanied two Culinary precinct walkers – Claudia, who handles room-service orders at one of Vegas’s mega-hotels, and Maria Teresa, who works as a server at another local behemoth, on a walk through a relatively new (most houses built in the 2000s) suburb. Going off a list not just of union members but rather all registered voters, they encountered a distinctively Vegas population: most of the people who came to the doors of these homes were Black and Latino, reflecting an aspect of the local economy that makes Vegas almost unique among American cities: that due to Culinary’s clout at winning contracts, many of the city’s service-sector workers (though only those in the big unionised hotels) have been able to afford home purchases. If they tried to buy today, however, the stratospheric rise in home prices would put such homes well out of their reach. 

Most of the voters with whom Claudia and Maria could talk were committed to or leaning toward Harris – elderly Black voters in particular. The previous day, when I accompanied the two Machinist union members in a run-down neighbourhood of homes in various states of repair, some of the respondents – Black and Latino young men in particular – made clear they were going to vote for Trump and didn’t care to discuss it. Unlike the Culinary members’ precinct walk, which targeted every household with registered voters, the Machinists’ canvass, which was part of an effort of the Nevada AFL-CIO (the umbrella organisation of most American unions), targeted just households with a union member, which presumably should have made them more pro-union in aggregate than one targeting a more general population.

Cesar Mendia is not surprised by this dispiriting phenomenon. A former Mexican journalist who came to America 35 years ago, where he is now a retired union member, he came to Nevada from Texas to work on the election as part of the AFL-CIO’s canvass. He’s been at it now every day for the past several months, just as he was in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. In 2016, going door to door in Vegas’s union households, he estimates 95 per cent of Latinos said they wouldn’t vote for Trump. But “not today,” he says, estimating the breakdown of Latinos in the union households he’s spoken to at just 65 per cent Harris, 35 per cent Trump. “We have to do a lot of work to educate the community,” he says.

The root problem, though, may be the nature of that community more than the unions’ or the Democrats’ efforts to educate it. When the American working class was the base of the Democratic Party and the linchpin of the New Deal coalition, working class communities were unionised. In the mid-20^th century, nearly 40 per cent of private-sector workers in the United States were union members; today, that figure is a bare 6 per cent. That means most American workers live in communities and work in workplaces where unions and union perspectives are nowhere to be found.

Their friends at work certainly don’t talk union, and they likely get their news from sources, in both legacy and social media, that increasingly are slanted either right or far-right. Those media, almost as much as Trump himself, are relentlessly xenophobic and are as dedicated as Trump to depicting Democrats as apostles of civilisational breakdown. College-educated voters, who can and do access less distorting and polemical media, are fast becoming the Democrats’ new base. But the disorganisation of the American working class, which has been the long-term strategic project of American conservatives and business leaders but whose implications Democrats were slow to understand and combat, may prove the Democrats’ undoing in the election now less than three weeks away.

UNITE HERE has been exceptional not just in the scope of its mobilisations but in its efforts to maintain and expand a culture of unionisation and a militant working class sensibility among its members. “We want our members to become accustomed to talking to workers in their communities and at their worksite,” says UNITE HERE President Gwen Mills. One feeds into the other; it makes them more effective in both. It’s good for UNITE HERE. It would be good for the labour movement.”