The state party’s vaunted operations have helped, but experts say the real credit goes to Las Vegas’s powerful Culinary Union Local 226, which represents more than 50,000 hospitality workers on the city’s famed Strip and beyond. Not only does the union wield tremendous economic clout within the state’s gaming industry, but its leaders have also become “very sophisticated in terms of how they collect data and how they communicate with their members,” says Ralston. As a result, “you have an organized labor movement here that does not exist anywhere else in the West,” says David Damore, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas political science professor.