Out in Nevada, a singular union provided a model of sorts for Democratic success. On
election night in 2018, a throng of workers, clad in bright red shirts with the name of their local
etched in thick black letters, half walked, half marched through the ridiculously wide corridors of
Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip. The members of Culinary Workers Union Local 226
laughed and chatted; occasionally, one would start chanting, “We vote, we win!” and his or her
comrades would keep the slogan going. They were headed for a ballroom at the hotel that
resembled a gargantuan parody of the Roman Forum to watch the returns come in.
When the secretary of state’s office finally released the tally, the union chant got quickly
transformed into reality. By convincing margins, voters elected Democrats to every statewide
office but one, as well as three out of Nevada’s four congressional seats; they also ousted the
incumbent Republican senator in the year’s only Democratic gain in the upper chamber (my son
was the challenger’s campaign manager). Democrats increased their already healthy majorities
in the legislature, too, and Nevada became the first state with more women than men in such a
body.
Without Local 226, some or all those victories may not have been possible. The
union—which represented some fifty-seven thousand workers who served guests in Vegas with
food and drink, cleaned their rooms, and carried their bags—was a formidable electoral
machine in Clark County, home to three of every four Nevadans. The union held regular political
education sessions for its members and rented buses to transport them to the polls. In the
contracts it signed with hotels, it even won the right for members to take a two-month leave from
their jobs to campaign.
When Democrats carried Clark by 10 percent or more, the white rural Republican base
could not muster enough votes to defeat them. In the teeth of the pandemic that pushed most of
its members into unemployment, Local 226 repeated that performance in 2020. Its members
knocked on more than half a million doors and again lifted Democrats to victories up and down
the ballot.
Local 226 was a model of multiculturalism in action. Its members hailed from more than
170 countries and spoke more than forty different languages. A majority were Latinos or Latinas,
and most were women. As the 2020 census reported, they belong to the fastest-growing
demographic group in the nation.
The expansive local helped thousands of workers to prepare for the citizenship exam; it
also ran a pharmacy where members and their families filled their prescriptions—for free. The
union thus projected an image of immigrants from south of the border that differed markedly
from that put forth by the left, which saw them largely as victims of nativist bigotry, or the right,
which cursed them as job stealers or criminals. These were immigrants who won power on the
job and knew how to use it to defend their political interests.
Unions like this, filled with workers who spoke with foreign accents as well as regional
ones, had been critical to creating the New Deal order. In the 1930s and ’40s, the CIO broke the
resistance of anti-union employers in the auto, steel, longshore, and electrical industries and
turned once solidly Republican states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan into strongholds of
pro-labor Democrats.
Heavy manufacturing has long been in decline in the United States and, with it, the
working-class institutions that once made it possible for men and women with only a high school
education or less to have a secure job that paid decent wages. But the men and women in Las
Vegas hotels who made beds, cleaned rugs, and cooked and served meals and drinks were
engaging in as socialized a form of labor as bolting a fender on a Chevrolet or tending a blast
furnace.
As in the strong industrial unions of the past, Local 226 gave its members a sense of
being part of a community of people who did not just work together. They also taught one
another the stakes of local and national politics and spent many hours fanning out around
Nevada to elect men and women who, they believed, would protect and advance their needs.
That meant endorsing and working for every Democrat who won his or her nomination, whether
they echoed the social-democratic ideology of Bernie Sanders or the practiced moderation of
Harry Reid, the state’s former senator, who arranged the match between union and party almost
twenty years before, when Democrats were a minority in Nevada.
The Democratic Party, as during the heydays of the New Deal and the Great Society,
can taste victory consistently only if its activists, candidates, and officeholders debate their
differences without one side denouncing or seeking to purge another. It would help if Democrats
everywhere, wage earners or not, emulated what the members of Local 226 accomplished in
their workplaces and neighborhoods. Just as the Republicans could not tout themselves the
“Christian party” if they did not have thousands of evangelical churches on their side, so
Democrats will not become a “working-class party” or true “party of the people” unless they help
build and support strong institutions of ordinary Americans to become potent forces in a broader
coalition. Durable groups composed of those who aspire to be what Walt Whitman called the
collective “equalizer of his age and land” remain essential to turning back the determined
challenge of an opposition that, under Donald Trump, doubted the very legitimacy of democratic
rule— whether with a lowercase or an uppercase “d.” We organize, we vote, and we win.