The strength and power of Las Vegas’s union of hotel employees—the 50,000-member Culinary Local 226 of UNITE HERE—has obscured the fact that Nevada’s right-to-work status impedes efforts to unionize workers. All else being equal, most unions are reluctant to organize in such states, because right-to-work laws allow union members to decline to pay dues to the union that represents them. The Culinary is an exceptional union in which more than 80 percent of its members pay dues anyway. (It’s also exceptional because its members turn out far more precinct walkers and phone-bankers for pro-union, almost invariably Democratic, candidates than any other organization of any kind.)

Nonetheless, 226 Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge told the Prospect that his union would certainly hire more organizers if right to work were repealed; so did the Teamsters’ state political director, Ross Kinson. “It’s not 2024,” Kinson told the Prospect, referring to a year when many Teamsters and other blue-collar workers voted for Donald Trump. “This year,” he said, “a lot more of them will vote Democratic.”