Nevada Democrats in tight race turn to ‘Reid’s car’

Nevada Democrats are in a quandary.

Sen. Katherine Cortez Masto is trailing Republican rival Adam Laxalt in recent polls. Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak is also trailing his challenger, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo. And Democratic nominee for Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is in a close race with Republican Jim Marchand, a 2020 election denier who is linked to QAnon conspiracy movement.

But in Las Vegas, the Democrats may have an ace up their sleeve: they have the backing of the highly motivated and powerful culinary union Local 226, an organization of 60,000 Las Vegas hotel staff that has a rich history of campaigning and turning elections in its favour.

In 2020, Cooking is known to have knocked on more than 650,000 doors across Nevada, handing out pamphlets and directing voters to their nearest polls.

This year’s Culinary Goal record 1 million doors. If the union achieves its goal, its organizers will contact nearly half of the state’s black and Hispanic voters and more than a third of Asian American voters.

“We’re not going to take anything less than a complete victory tomorrow on Election Day,” Ted Pappajorge, Cookery Secretary-Treasurer, told a crowd of more than 400 union members during a campaign rally on Monday morning. “Today there are people who don’t want cleaners, cooks and waiters to have power. Well, guess what? We’re going to show them how much power house cleaners, waiters and cooks have.”

Food agitators, all paid union members on vacation from casino jobs, have been knocking on doors since March. They focused on excluding their union colleagues, who tend not to vote in midterm elections, as well as new citizens and minority voters.

“No one runs a comprehensive campaign like Culinary does,” Bethany Khan, the union’s director of communications, told the Times.

The Culinary’s campaigning activities are part of a vote-getting mechanism that became known in the late 2000s. The late sen. Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, relied heavily on Cooking and its largely Hispanic membership to help get President Obama elected in 2008 and secure his own election victories as a swing state Democrat. Reed’s ability to stimulate broad union support centered on agitation for the working class became known as Reed’s machine.

But Reed died last year, and some Democrats are worried that the state is moving to the right. President Biden won Nevada in 2020, but only by a narrow margin, and Republicans are hoping for a high turnout in heavily conservative rural districts.

Laxalt, a Republican Senate nominee, is a former Nevada Attorney General and has a prominent name in Nevada politics—his grandfather was governor in the 1960s and continued in the Senate in the 80s. Cortez Masto, a former U.S. Attorney, is running for a second term in the Silver State and is Reed’s chosen successor. Clark County, where Lombardo serves as sheriff, is home to Las Vegas, giving the Republican gubernatorial candidate high status in the state’s Democratic stronghold.

Before heading out to knock on doors on Monday, the agitators received word from a Nevada lieutenant. Governor Lisa Cano Burkhead and member of the House of Representatives. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley), who received a standing ovation.

“You are fighting for the core American dream,” Hanna said. “That if you work a lot, you should be able to either rent housing or have affordable housing.”

Cooking has a slate of candidates dubbed “Neighborhood stability slate will challenge Wall Street homeowners”, singling out those who advocate rent control measures that limit rent increases to 5% per year.

At the national level, the Democrats have focused on restoring abortion rights and positioning themselves as a party that will fight to uphold American democracy. They portray Republican candidates as extremists, indebted to the fringes of their party, who are obsessed with destroying voting rights and depriving citizens of the right to have access to abortion. These are serious issues for some Democratic voters, but economic issues are on the minds of many Nevadans.

“What we’re seeing on the doors is that working class voters — whether they’re working class Hispanic voters, working class black voters, white working class voters — are concerned about the cost of living,” PappaGeorge. said. “They are worried about the price of gas, and at the same time, these oil companies are making record profits.”

On Monday, culinary agitators took to the streets in groups of two, most wearing red zip-up sweatshirts with the slogan “Workers to the front” (and in Spanish “Trabajadores al Fronte”), pasted in large letters on the back. During a rally at the Culinary Headquarters, the leaders made speeches that often consisted of short sentences in English or Spanish that were quickly translated back and forth. Most pairs of agitators had at least one Spanish speaker.

Campaigners carry iPads with registered voter lists, and if no one answers, they leave a leaflet on the door with their choice of candidates and positions on key issues. Polling neighborhood residents and getting people to vote is an easy way to help the culinary community, says 64-year-old Maria Orozco, adding that culinary means “everything” to her.

“I have insurance, good benefits and community support,” she told The Times during the campaign. Orozco works as a porter at the Westgate Resort and Casino. She has been with the Culinary Department for 18 years and this is her fifth time on the campaign trail.

“We’ve talked to a lot of people about the cost of living,” said Rory Quickendall, 39, Orozco’s campaigning partner. Kuikendall is a bellhop at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino and a seven-year-old member of the culinary community.

Most of the time, no one opened the door as they walked through a working-class neighborhood of one- and two-story Spanish-style houses. The people who answered either had already voted or didn’t want to reveal their voting preferences.

“If people don’t want to talk, [then] I always focus only on turnout. I really think that a high turnout is good for our candidates,” Kuikendall said. “So I’m always happy to tell people where they can vote. [and] How can they vote?

With Reed’s death, the influence of the political machine he helped build was called into question, especially after Sisola failed to get support largest teacher union in the state. But the Nevada Democratic machine has always been more than just one man; he relied on the energy and enthusiasm of thousands of agitators.

“We like to call it the 226 Cooking Machine,” said Pappajorge. “Senator Reid was a great man who defended workers and working families. But our job was to continue that legacy. This year we’ll knock on a million doors [election day], which will be the biggest mobilization we have ever done. Therefore, we think that if we knock on these doors, we will win.”