LAS VEGAS, Nevada. — Democratic presidential candidates arrived in Nevada this week to discover that Sin City’s powerful hospitality union calls the shots.
With more than 65,000 members, many of them voters of color, the Culinary Union has the ability to make or break presidential bids and their endorsement is a highly-coveted prize by Democrats hoping to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“The path to the White House for a Democratic candidate runs through Nevada, through the Las Vegas Strip, and the Culinary Union,” Bethany Khan, the union’s spokeswoman, told The Post ahead of Saturday’s Nevada caucus.
“That’s really powerful because that means that the path to the White House runs through working people,” she said.
That explains why all hell broke loose last week when the 82-year-old organization chose not to endorse anyone and went even further by rebuking front runner Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ signature Medicare for All policy.
The union essentially declared war on the Sanders campaign, distributing flyers warning that Medicare for All would strip them of their union health care plan.
Incensed, supporters of the socialist candidate “viciously attacked” union employees, Khan told CNN, flooding their phone lines with abusive messages.
Approximately 145,000 union members and their relatives are covered by the Culinary Health Fund which was earned after an exhaustive strike that lasted six years. Sanders’ policy would ban all alternative forms of insurance, including the union’s.
“Here in Nevada, we’ve enacted this vision and it’s tangible, it’s real and it’s something that we hold in our hands and we feel so strongly about it because workers have a say over it and workers built this health fund over 82 years,” Khan said.
“We support those things but we just want to retain the choice that we have,” she added.
When asked if the non-endorsement was the result of a lackluster field of candidates, the union said its members were split after hearing the candidates speak and because there was no clear front runner, they left the decision to them.
Wednesday evening’s firey debate and the inclusion of Michael Bloomberg has not changed their decision.
Polls taken before Saturday’s caucus have failed to shed light on how Nevadans of color will vote.
A shock Telemundo poll released Tuesday had Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden essentially tied among Latino voters while a Univision poll released that same day had Sanders leading at 33 percent, followed by Biden at 22 percent.
Presidential wannabes have been trying to woo the union’s diverse members for more than a year — attending intimate town halls and joining their picket line at the Palms Casino Resort — in the hopes of snagging their endorsement.
Nevada is far more diverse than primarily-white Iowa and New Hampshire and therefore reflective of the US population, Latinos making up 30 percent of its residents.
The campaigns of ex-South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar have both been plagued by poor polling numbers with voters of color.
After better-than-expected performances at the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, a seal of approval from the highly influential union would have given Buttigieg and Klobuchar a huge boost with the housekeepers, cooks, waitresses and bartenders that form the backbone of Las Vegas’s booming economy.
During a break from phone banking, union member Miguel Canales declined to say who he was voting for but described his path to political engagement after becoming a citizen in 2007.
“I realized that my vote was very important. There’s a lot of misconceptions where people think ‘My vote doesn’t count,’ and I realized that is not true,” he said.
“I realized when I did become a citizen that that was something that I definitely wanted to be a part of,” he added.
“We’re one of the biggest unions here. If we organize the workers and if you tell them everything they need to know, they’ll make the right decision.”
