What happens in Vegas

On a cloudless 80-degree day in October, Courtney Zelenak, a housecleaner on the Las Vegas strip, and Norma Torres, a guest room attendant, were going door to door in a working class west Vegas neighborhood to turn out voters.

If Kamala Harris carries Nevada this year, it will be due in no small part to the efforts of people like Zelenak and Torres. Both are members of the powerful Culinary Workers Union, a 60,000 member-strong behemoth that has become central to the political landscape in the Silver State. The two estimate that they’ve knocked on “thousands” of doors since September, a microcosm of a formidable ground operation that has helped deliver Democratic victories even in difficult years.

“Truthfully, we’re not a blue state, we’re barely purple,” said Ted Pappageorge, the Culinary’s secretary-treasurer, in an interview at their headquarters. “So there’s something going on here that is different and we think that difference is us.” That difference has helped power Democrats to victory in nearly every statewide race the past decade, including in 2016, when Nevada was the only battleground state Hillary Clinton won, and 2020, when the union continued canvassing even as most Democrats shied away from in-person efforts due to COVID.

In 2022, members knocked on over one million doors to aid Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who ultimately defied most national prognosticators’ predictions to win re-election by 8,000 votes. The union hopes to continue its streak this year. “We plan to hit 950,000 doors by Election Day,” Pappageorge said. “We’re gonna have tens of thousands of conversations, and drive votes.”

But 2024 is shaping up to be a stress test for Democrats in Nevada. The state’s tourism-dependent economy was decimated by COVID: 98% of the union’s members became unemployed. Gas prices are the fourth highest in the nation and the housing crisis is omnipresent. And the state’s demographics — Nevada is one of the most working class in the country and is the only swing state that is majority minority — have gone from being a core Democratic asset to potentially fertile ground for a Trump campaign. Amidst an ongoing realignment sorting the electorate along class and educational lines, polls show Trump has made real inroads among working class and non-white voters, especially Latinos.

Even before pollsters began to warn of Democratic erosion among non-white voters this cycle, Nevada was a red flag: It was one of just six states in which Joe Biden performed worse than Hillary Clinton. That was part of a broader pattern, as Democrats have watched their presidential nominees’ victory margin shrink every presidential cycle since 2008. Republicans clearly see opportunity — but questions remain around their ability to translate that into votes. As in other states, GOP turnout efforts are largely routed through a network of outside PACs, a risky and untested strategy that makes it dependent on groups like America First Works and Turning Point USA. Those groups, in turn, rely on many existing operatives within the swing states. In Nevada, those figures are acutely aware of Democrats’ historical advantage.

“I know that in the past the culinary union has been the sole machinery and mechanism that has driven Democratic victories, but this time is different,” said Jesus Marquez, who helps lead the American Christian Caucus, a religious right organization working closely with America First Works. Marquez served as an adviser to Cortez Masto’s 2022 opponent, former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, an experience he cites to emphasize Republicans’ superior efforts this cycle. “There was really nothing compared with what we have this time around.”

So far, Nevada’s early voting numbers give some credence to that: After years of Democrats’ leading the early vote, Republicans have opened up a 40,000 vote advantage one week before Election Day. One official involved in GOP turnout efforts said that, “with caution,” they believed a Trump win was “assured.”

Nonetheless, Democrats and their allies remain confident — and many are openly dismissive of Republicans’ operation. A culinary union official said they’ve seen “no evidence of a ground game” in the state. Catherine Cortez Masto, the state’s senior senator, called herself “very confident” in Harris’s chances, even comparing enthusiasm for the vice president to “when Obama was running.”

Masto’s assessment carries some weight: She trailed in most polling averages in the final months of her 2022 race, with national Republicans predicting her defeat even after polls closed. Her narrow victory, which was not declared until the Saturday after Election Day, continued the trend of Nevada Democrats’ overperforming public polling. “The strength in Nevada is that [ground] organization,” Cortez Masto said in an interview at the state party’s headquarters. “We organize our way to victory as Democrats.”

Still, Nevada is emblematic of a larger challenge for the party. The state has the highest proportion of voters without a college degree of any swing state. While Democrats have lost ground among non-college white voters for years, their erosion among people of color without degrees is more recent: Biden won Latino voters without degrees by just 14 points in 2020, creating an unprecedented 25-point education gap among the country’s largest non-white voting bloc, according to validated exit poll data from Pew Research.

Those results made Latino voters without college degrees more Republican in 2020 than white voters with college degrees, a change that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. Bacilia Angel, an organizer at Grita Canta Vota, a non-partisan campaign aimed at mobilizing Latino voters, attributes the shift in voting patterns in part to the sheer growth in the Latino population. “Every 30 seconds, a Latino turns 18,” Angel said. “In every state it’s a growing population.”

Whatever the cause, the ongoing educational realignment of the electorate has benefited Democrats in some whiter, better educated districts and states. But Nevada is not one of them. And while its historic infrastructure advantage may still deliver the state, its broader challenge is not going away. “The diploma divide is consolidating it as a wealthy, white, home-owning party,” said Mike Madrid, a veteran political consultant who has spent years warning of Republican inroads among Latinos. “This is all self-inflicted, because the Democratic Party’s culture has convinced itself and is still having a difficult time believing that non-white people can have any other option.”

While Madrid takes a more dire stance than many, operatives in both parties do expect Trump to perform better among Latinos than he did in 2020 — a remarkable feat after eight years of Democratic accusations of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. For Nevada Democrats, it’s a test like no other — and one with bigger implications than just its six electoral votes. Whatever the final result, even optimists like Pappageorge expect a long night.

“This is gonna be a nailbiter.” 

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