At dawn in Las Vegas, some four hundred hospitality workers, among them waiters, line cooks, and bussers, gathered at the Culinary Union’s headquarters, north of the Strip. Every morning for the past nine months, the workers have joined fellow-canvassers to knock on a million doors by Election Day. “We’ve never done that before,” Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer, said. “We knew this would be a difficult race.”
A formidable political force, the Culinary Union wields strong influence within Nevada. A key question this year, when control of the Senate hinges on Nevada’s deeply competitive race, is whether it can deliver for the Democratic incumbent, Catherine Cortez Masto. At the union’s meeting this morning, Pappageorge introduced the Democratic senator, who wore a red Culinary shirt. “Are we ready to win?” Cortez Masto asked the raucous crowd. “You know how we win? It’s all of you. It is your work, it is your voices, that is going to pull us over the finish line.”
In the crowd was Linda Hunt, a server in her sixties who joined the union more than forty years ago. A hale woman with curly dark hair and gold-rimmed glasses, Hunt has lost count of the number of voters she has spoken to since she began canvassing this summer, but she is quick to name the issues that she has consistently heard at the door: housing, prescription-drug prices, and inflation. They will prove to be the biggest challenge for Democrats at the polls in Nevada and elsewhere.