Nevada has become a key battleground in the US presidential election. The Democratic candidates have especially come to Las Vegas, where three-quarters of the population of this desert state lives. In fact, It's the Democrats' not-so-secret weapon in Nevada: a vast army of cooks, waiters and hoteliers who helped swing the swing state to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

Looking ahead to the November elections, the Culinary Union, which represents 60,000 hotel and casino workers, mainly in Las Vegas, is preparing to mobilize its union against Donald Trump for the third time.

"By Election Day, we will have 500 union members - men and women who normally clean hotel rooms, cook or serve drinks - working full time, knocking on doors, registering people to vote, taking people to the polls. ballot boxes," says union secretary-treasurer Ted Pappageorge. "Get votes. There is no other way to win."

Clinton was a frequent visitor in 2016, courting hotel workers and union members in casino employee lounges and coffee shops. It was one of the few pivotal states that he won. Biden won another close race four years later. Recently, he and his Vice President Kamala Harris made time to picket and celebrate hard-fought new contracts with union members. 
In his book "Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor," author Steven Greenhouse calls the Culinary Union a "political monster that has done much to turn Nevada from red to blue", referring to the Republican and Democratic colors, respectively. "We play a very important role," Pappageorge agreed. "But it's a special role."

Where does its influence come from?

Its influence comes not only from being the largest union in Nevada, where 60% of members are Latino and 55% women, but also from its vote-collecting political machine. 

In 2022, when Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was reelected by fewer than 8,000 votes, the Culinary Union said its canvassers knocked on more than a million doors and spoke to 175,000 voters, in a state of three million people. This year, the union will raise funds to pay hundreds of union canvassers to leave their jobs and take to the streets again, Pappageorge said.

"They register for three to six months during the election year. They walk through the neighborhoods every day, 10 hours a day (...), they are chased by dogs and they go through all kinds of things," he explained. "Workers talking to workers. This is how we drive the working class vote in Nevada," he summarized.