AMEER BASHEER/UNSPLASH
Nevada Democrats have always been able to count on Las Vegas’s Culinary Workers union, the state’s number one door-knockers.
This article appears in the June 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The overriding issue that will bring voters to the polls this November, Republicans say, will be inflation—voters, in keeping with political history, will blame Biden for rising prices and cast their ballots for the GOP. The overriding issue, Democrats contend, will be the Supreme Court’s revocation (still likely as I write this) of Roe v. Wade, which will enable Democrats to hold and win any number of seats they were expected to lose before the right-wing Supremes weighed in.
If there’s any state where this inflation-vs.-abortion contest will play out most dramatically, it should be Nevada. According to a New York Times compendium of state polls (all taken before the Alito bombshell was leaked), the number of pro-choice Nevadans exceeded the number of anti-choicers by a whopping 31 percentage points. Regulation of personal behavior has never been a feature of the state whose de facto motto has been “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Advantage, Democrats.
However, in Clark County, Nevada—which encompasses Las Vegas and its suburbs and is home to the majority of Nevadans—rents rose by 29 percent over the past three years. A separate survey taken by the state’s largest union—UNITE HERE, which represents the workers in Vegas’s mammoth hotel-casinos—found that 20 percent of its members had experienced increases in their monthly rent of $500 or more during the past year. Advantage, Republicans.
Which means that this fall’s elections in Nevada will be “a fucking dogfight,” in the words of one veteran leader of statewide campaigns. “If the election were held today,” that leader told me in mid-May, “I think [incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve] Sisolak would win, but [incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine] Cortez Masto would lose. Each probably by a margin of 15,000 votes or less.”
A loss by Cortez Masto, of course, would markedly lower the Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate. Whatever the outcome come November, what happens in Vegas won’t just stay there.
NEVADA DEMOCRATS, and their counterparts in Arizona—the two Southwestern swing states—have a tried-and-true method of winning fucking dogfights: ground war. Just as in the other 48 states, they also wage the hugely expensive air war of advertising, but more unusually, walking precincts and knocking on doors has made the difference in every recent Democratic victory in both states.
That’s especially true in Nevada, where several distinct efforts have accompanied recent campaigns. The state party apparatus put together by the late former senator (and former Senate Democratic leader) Harry Reid has waged ground games of its own in every election of the past two decades. This year, the Reid operatives set up their own operation after activists from the Democratic Socialists of America, who’d had signal successes winning votes for Bernie Sanders in the state caucuses of 2016 and 2020, won control of the state party. Each faction will be on the ground for the remainder of the year.
Community and labor activists have a considerable ground game history of their own in the state, by far the largest of which has been that of UNITE HERE, whose 50,000-member local of Las Vegas hotel workers—Local 226, also known as the Culinary Workers—has long been the state’s number one door-knocker. In 2020, when the coronavirus limited every other group to phone-banking, UNITE HERE was the only door-knocker on the Democratic side, as the union had already employed and engaged public-health experts to devise safety equipment (more than mere masks) for its members still encountering the public in hotels. Adhering to those protocols and encased in that equipment, UNITE HERE fielded roughly 500 canvassers, all members, who knocked on approximately 650,000 doors to talk to voters, chiefly about the differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the bread-and-butter issues that concerned voters most. In a state of just 3.1 million residents, that’s a lot of doors, and a lot of voters.
Republicans in both Arizona and Nevada will have to figure out how to navigate the likely repeal of Roe.
In Arizona, UNITE HERE has fewer members, but has established a beachhead in some Phoenix hotels. Its members there belong to a bistate local—Local 11, which is also the hotel worker union and a political powerhouse in Los Angeles. As such, UNITE HERE was able to field 400 door-knockers in Arizona in 2020—again, almost the only ones on the Democratic side—though a number came from Los Angeles, where the presidential election clearly wasn’t going to be close. In a state with more than double the population of Nevada—7.1 million—those canvassers were able to knock on 750,000 doors in 2020.
Those weren’t the only states where the union waged a huge ground game in 2020. Their East Coast locals supplemented their Pennsylvania locals to amass hundreds of canvassers who focused on turning out the vote in Philadelphia, and experienced canvassers from across the country flocked to Georgia for the two Senate runoff elections in January 2021.
As should be obvious from the sheer volume of their efforts, UNITE HERE canvassers don’t limit their canvass to their fellow members or union members generally—but neither do they reach out to all registered Democrats. A number of those door-knocks are repeat engagements with their targeted audience. “The people that we target often don’t vote regularly,” says Susan Minato, the co-president of Local 11. That means the canvassers will be targeting the young, people of color, and suburban women whose votes may swing due to the abortion issue. Accordingly, the canvassers will be talking not just about the party’s differences on economic policy but also about a woman’s right to choose, given the Court’s likely revocation of that right. As one union official points out, “a majority of our members are women, and their health and safety is a critical concern for us.”
In Arizona, according to the Times’ compendium of previous state polls, pro-choice voters also outnumber their anti-choice counterparts, but not as decisively as in Nevada—the margin in Arizona is 13 percentage points, which is significant but not as overwhelming as Nevada’s 31 points.
And this year, the union plans to field even more canvassers in these two swing states. “Our goal in Nevada this year is to knock on nearly twice as many doors as we did in 2020,” says Gwen Mills, who is the secretary-treasurer of the international union. “Though it’s a midterm, we will have the same number of canvassers on the ground as we had in 2020—500—but they’ll be putting in more hours. In fact, they’re already on the ground now.” In Arizona, says Brendan Walsh, who represents the union within Arizona Wins, a coalition of labor and community organizations, the union’s efforts this year will be augmented by Black, Latino, tribal, and other groups that confined their efforts largely to phone banks in 2020. That will mean, he estimates, that the number of face-to-face voter encounters will rise from the roughly one million of 2020 to three million this year.
In both states, canvassing, though not yet on a massive scale, began in March of this year, to sound voters out on issues and hone the canvassers’ pitches.
IN ARIZONA, INCUMBENT DEMOCRATIC Sen. Mark Kelly took office just two years ago after winning a special election. Polls show him with small leads over his Republican challengers, though most of these were taken before those challengers began their campaign advertising. (The primary won’t take place until early August.) The Republicans who seek to oust Kelly include Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who accused all five Maricopa County (Phoenix and its suburbs) supervisors of allowing 2020 election fraud to happen under their noses; and Blake Masters, who acclaimed the provisional Alito decision, has been endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene, and still hopes to get Donald Trump’s backing. A third candidate, Jim Lamon, is a businessman who’d spent $13 million of his own money on his campaign as of April, and thereafter saw a commensurate rise in the primary polling.
The state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, is term-limited out of office. The leaders in the party’s respective gubernatorial primaries are Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican former local Fox news anchor Kari Lake, who comes off as the possible spawn of Ron Burgundy and a QAnon devotee. Last year, Lake quit her post at the Phoenix Fox station, citing liberal media bias, but also after she repeatedly crossed swords with management and viewers over her advocacy of right-wing conspiracy theories, which included her belief that Trump had actually carried Arizona. She’s been endorsed not only by Trump but by such key Trump retainers as Michael Flynn, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, and Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame. Lake has also called for the imprisonment of Hobbs for presumably helping to mastermind the theft of the state from Trump in 2020, which should make for interesting evenings if and when Lake and Hobbs meet to debate in the fall.
In Nevada, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak has led by roughly ten percentage points in most of the polls against his possible Republican opponents, while Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is in a tight race with Republican primary front-runner Adam Laxalt, trailing him in several polls. Six years ago, Cortez Masto was first elected to the Senate by a bare 2.4 percentage point margin.
Arizona Democrats hope that Lake’s Trumpier-than-Trump politics will lead the state’s remaining McCain Republicans to vote for Hobbs. As Republicans hold just a two-seat majority in each house of the state legislature, Democrats also hope that they can win control there, though there are a number of districts in each house for which no Democrat had filed to run as of mid-May (not all of them heavily Republican).
Hobbs will not only be harmed by the rate of inflation, but also by the ongoing influx of immigrants on the state’s southern border, and President Biden’s effort (currently blocked by a court) to rescind his predecessor’s order to block immigrant entry due to COVID. But Republicans in both Arizona and Nevada will have to figure out how to navigate the likely repeal of Roe.
For her part, Lake has confined her campaign’s issue page statement on the question to ten words: “I am pro-life. Always have been and always will be.” (Most of her other issue statements are considerably longer.) In heavily pro-choice Nevada, the likely Republican Senate nominee, former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, has affirmed that he’s anti-abortion, but points out that the right to an abortion “is currently settled law in our state,” due to a 1990 voter referendum that can only be repealed by a further referendum—though that could be overridden by a federal ban by Congress or the Court.
So, come November, will the abortion question or the inflation question be the question of the day? Ermila Medina is a member of the Vegas Culinary local who’s been door-knocking since March of this year. On the one hand, she reports, the voters she’s encountered have expressed dismay about soaring rents and the price of gas and food. They blame Biden for this, even though, she adds, “I don’t think he’s to blame.” On the other hand, she says, “a lot of people I’ve spoken with agree with me that no one should get to decide for women whether we have an abortion or not. It’s a health issue that only the woman has the right to decide.”
Democrats have to hope that Medina and her fellow canvassers find many such determinedly pro-choice voters as they knock on the doors.
