Courtesy Culinary Union
For several decades, hundreds of Culinary Union members have taken leave from their jobs to knock on the doors of local registered voters and engage them in discussions of the candidates.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
LAS VEGAS – When we met in his office at the sprawling and somewhat ramshackle Las Vegas headquarters of Culinary Union Local 226 last Monday, a day when the New York Times averages of the polls in the seven swing states had Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in Nevada by less than 1 percent, Ted Pappageorge wasn’t buying it.
“We don’t really believe the polls,” said Pappageorge, who’s the secretary-treasurer of Culinary, as the local is commonly called. “Trump’s people generally under-poll, and if we had an election today, I think Trump wins.”
“But it’s not today,” he continued. “We’ve got three weeks to go and the Culinary army is out there, going to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors and talk to hundreds of thousands of people.”
In the context of actually existing American politics, the designation of his canvassers as an army is not an overstatement. With 60,000 members—the vast majority of them housekeepers and the wait and kitchen staffers at Las Vegas’s mega-hotel/casinos—Culinary may well be the largest local union of any kind in the United States. For several decades, hundreds of its members have taken an election leave from their jobs to knock on the doors of local registered voters and engage them in discussions of the candidates. It’s a full-time job. For a few, it lasts the better part of an election year; for some, it runs from summer to Election Day; and for the rest of the 400-plus who walk the precincts, it’s a monthlong gig for seven days a week.
In the pandemic year of 2020, when candidates and parties and outside groups and even other unions all eschewed canvassing, Culinary—almost all of whose members were jobless as the hotel/casinos had shuttered their doors—fielded canvassers who still went out in force, masked with special gear devised by epidemiologists. By Election Day, they’d contacted fully half of Nevada’s Black and Latino voters, and one-third of the state’s Asian voters, too.
UNITE HERE, Culinary’s national union, canvassed in three states in 2020: Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Joe Biden won them all, which produced the margin of victory in the Electoral College.
The day after I met with Pappageorge, Culinary’s 425 full-time canvassers packed themselves into a hall for a rally as they embarked on the final three weeks of the campaign. They heard from leaders of some far-flung UNITE HERE locals (New Orleans, Anchorage), who’d come to Vegas to help out; in turn, those visitors called out some other UNITE HERE members who’d arrived from non-swing states to help push Nevada into Harris’s column.
Once again this year, Nevada is one of three swing states where UNITE HERE locals are mounting efforts almost comparable to Culinary’s. More than 400 UNITE HERE members are now canvassing in Pennsylvania (most in Philadelphia, some in Harrisburg) and Arizona (most in Phoenix, some in Tucson). In those states, though, a higher share of the full-time canvassers come from out of state than in Nevada, where Culinary has numbers that the other states can’t match. The Philly canvassers are a mix of locals and members from New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Atlantic City; those in Arizona include Angelenos, San Diegans, and sundry Texans.
All told, UNITE HERE now has roughly 1,500 full-time precinct walkers in those three swing states, a figure that will rise to 2,000 by the campaign’s final week. By the metric of person-hours worked, its operations in those three states are the largest of any kind those states will see. The union also is fielding smaller operations in seven other states, focusing on races like Sen. Sherrod Brown’s very tight battle for re-election in Ohio, and swing House districts in California and New York.
That said, the work of the precinct walker ain’t what it used to be.
John Locher/AP Photo
Members of the Culinary Workers Union cheer as Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge speaks during a rally along the Las Vegas Strip, August 10, 2023.
I WENT ON TWO PRECINCT WALKS while in Vegas. On the first, sponsored by the state’s AFL-CIO, I accompanied two members of the Machinists union who were canvassing full-time, seven days a week. The first was a leader of the local at Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Vegas; the second, a former leader of the local at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, whom the national union had deployed to Vegas. The blocks they were given were in an economically precarious neighborhood of single-family homes in varying degrees of repair and disrepair. The list they were handed included only registered voters at households where at least one resident was a union member, and, as Las Vegas is a city with an uncommonly high share of such households, some blocks included as many as nine such homes.
Not many opened their doors to these canvassers. It was midday Sunday, with NFL games on the tube. At houses with as many as four cars parked in their driveways, nobody came to the door. Moreover, the residents, like all Nevada voters, have been inundated for months with election ads, mailings, information, and misinformation. (This inundation is why Culinary isn’t putting any ads on television; at this point, the union believes, only person-to-person exchanges on doorsteps can boost turnout or persuade an undecided voter.) As the canvassers walked up to one house, a woman emerged toting a ream of election mailings, walked to the sidewalk, and ceremoniously deposited those mailings in a trash bin awaiting the next day’s pickup.
A few residents did come to the doors. The more elderly ones welcomed the canvassers and expressed support for Harris; the canvassers then discussed the how-tos of voting by mail, early voting, or Election Day voting. With the vast majority of voters irrevocably committed to either Harris or Trump, canvassers are focusing disproportionately on making sure base voters get their ballots in.
When the canvassers encountered a union voter who needed convincing, they highlighted the differences between Harris and Trump on economic issues. I was surprised to hear that their brief presentation began with “Have you heard of Project 2025?” That’s the compendium of far-right proposals authored by Trump’s associates, which the canvassers used as an entryway into the horrors Trump would inflict on workers.
Not all respondents were pro-Harris or undecided. One young Black man declared his support for Trump, then refused to provide any reasons for his choice. It’s the prevalence of such preferences that leaves Democrats so worried. “Nevada’s not blue; it’s purple,” says Pappageorge, who notes that Biden carried the state by 30,000 votes in 2020 out of more than two million cast. This year, he says, if Harris wins, it will be by “10,000 or less.”
That’s why the Culinary canvassers, unlike those in the AFL-CIO canvass, don’t confine themselves to talking just to union households. Instead, they knock on the doors of every registered voter in most Vegas neighborhoods.
Most American workers live in communities and work in workplaces where unions and union perspectives are nowhere to be found.
Last Monday, on my second precinct walk, I accompanied two Culinary precinct walkers who were traversing a relatively new (most houses built in the 2000s) suburb. Claudia handles room service orders at one of Vegas’s mega-hotels, and Maria Teresa works as a server at another local behemoth.
Going off a list of 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: Due to Culinary’s clout at winning contracts, many of the city’s service-sector workers (chiefly those in the big unionized hotels) have historically been able to afford home purchases. If they tried to buy today, however, the stratospheric rise in prices would put such homes well out of reach, which was one of the canvassers’ talking points: Even if you could afford a home like this ten years ago, will your kids be able to ten years from now?
In fact, the rising price of housing (up by more than a third in just the past few years) was the topic most respondents brought up at their doorways when Culinary walked precincts in the midterm election of 2022. It’s one of the two most frequently raised issues that respondents are bringing up today, along with the price of food. Culinary canvassers respond that the price of housing has been raised in large part by “Wall Street”—that is, private equity firms like Blackstone—buying up as many as 40 percent of the homes in some Vegas neighborhoods and then renting them out, which substantially reduces the number of houses on the market for potential homebuyers.
Pappageorge notes that they stressed the primacy of this issue in Nevada in discussions with the Harris campaign; while watching a Dodgers-Mets playoff game on Vegas’s Fox affiliate, I saw a Harris ad pledging she’d stop Wall Street from cornering the housing market.
Like the Machinist canvassers one day earlier, Claudia and Maria Teresa found only a limited number of people willing to come to their doors. As this was a more upscale neighborhood, however, they were frequently greeted by recordings saying nobody was home. They weren’t daunted, leaving literature in the doorway and knowing that they’d return several times before Election Day. The most enthusiastically pro-Harris voters they encountered were elderly Blacks and younger Latinas.
The substance of their message often changes, if only by nuance, day by day. Culinary gets data from all its precinct walkers at the end of each day’s canvass on which issues are raised by which groups of voters, and has the capacity to print new literature or alter the doorstep pitches overnight. As their canvassers are encountering a wider panoply of voters than just union members, those canvassers are prepared to address a range of topics that go beyond the union’s most common bread-and-butter concerns. Our canvassers “lead with economic issues,” says Gwen Mills, UNITE HERE’s international president, “but if a voter raises reproductive freedom, our members are prepared to talk about it.”
Courtesy Culinary Union
The Culinary Union’s 425 full-time canvassers attend a rally as they head into the final three weeks of the presidential campaign.
NEVADA DEMOCRATS APPEAR LESS WORRIED about the most prominent down-ticket contests than they are about the presidential outcome. Sen. Jacky Rosen is up for re-election, but has drawn a weak, far-right challenger who’s been the state chair of the Faith and Freedom organization, which is one of Nevada’s foremost opponents of abortion and LGBTQ rights, not exactly popular positions in a notably libertarian state. Rosen’s union bona fides are in very good order; when she was a young woman needing to supplement her income, she went to work as a waitress at Caesars Palace, so she’s a Culinary alum.
In addressing a rally of workers from a wide range of unions before the AFL-CIO canvass, Rosen cited any number of issues of particular concern to union members, including the far-right proposals in Project 2025 that would strip workers of some of their most basic rights.
But the story of this year’s election, of course, increasingly centers on the drift of working-class voters into Donald Trump’s column. The ultimate swing vote, in Nevada and across the country, “isn’t Blacks and Latinos,” Mario Yedidia, UNITE HERE’s national elections director, told me at Culinary’s Monday rally. “It’s the working class.”
Cesar Mendia is not surprised by this dispiriting phenomenon. A former Mexican journalist who came to America 35 years ago, he is now a retired union member who 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 among Vegas’s union households, he estimates, 95 percent 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 percent Harris, 35 percent 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 union-led or Democratic 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 unionized. In the mid-20th century, nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers in the United States were union members; today, that figure is a bare 6 percent.
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 may well get their news from sources, in both legacy and social media, that increasingly are slanted either to the 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 civilizational breakdown.
This disorganization of the American working class has been the long-term strategic project of American conservatives and business leaders, one whose implications Democrats were slow to understand and combat. Particularly during the 1990s, with the passage of NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China, Democrats were all too happy to abet this project. Now, Democrats depend on the remaining handful of potent working-class organizations like UNITE HERE to stanch the defections to Republican xenophobes and faux populists.
As in the other swing states on which the outcome of this profoundly nerve-wracking election depends, the polling in Nevada is well within the margin of error. The election’s outcome, says UNITE HERE president Mills, will be determined by “the margin of efforts,” none more intense or effective than those of the housekeepers and wait and kitchen staffers who keep Las Vegas running, and on whose efforts the future of American democracy may well depend.
