Nevada was one of the few bright spots for Democrats as election results came in last week—Democrats swept the state, from Hillary Clinton to Catherine Cortez Masto to the state legislature. UNITE HERE’s powerful Culinary Union Local 226 was key to those victories. In the wake of the election, union president D Taylor explained how the union organized to make that happen:
Organization doesn’t mean a fancy building or a fundraising machine: it means having the capacity to facilitate lots of people talking to lots of other people. Over 80% of what our union spent in this multi-billion-dollar election cycle went to registering and mobilizing voters through face-to-face communication. We knocked on over 350,000 doors and talked to over 75,000 voters. We shared our point of view and took the time to listen to what people wanted to say.
We often went back to the same person – twice or three times if we needed to. Our members have had doors slammed in their faces, but most voters were eager to talk. So much presidential campaigning is conveyed through television ads and glossy mailers. Real respect comes when another human being is passionate enough about an issue to knock on a stranger’s door and talk.
The union also went outside of its area of greatest strength:
We couldn’t win Nevada for our presidential candidate if we stayed only in Las Vegas. We had to first transform the state into a battleground, and then work to win it. In 2008, we expanded our political operation north into Washoe County. The biggest city there is Reno, where we have a much smaller membership. In Reno, voters wanted to talk about education and college debt. We sometimes disagreed about the solution, but had the respect to listen.
The people who live in Washoe County are the same people that no one talked to in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida who voted for Trump. We did the hard work and won Washoe County for Hillary Clinton by 2,503 votes.
There are lessons here and it’s not just the Democratic Party that needs to learn them. All progressives do.