Union takes caucus down to the wire

Michael J. Mishak

Sunday, Dec. 23, 2007 | 6:54 a.m.

With the Nevada presidential caucus less than a month away, the Culinary Union is hitting the streets to prepare its 60,000 members for perhaps the biggest political event in the state's history. There's only one catch: The union hasn't settled on a candidate.

The Culinary has spent the past month running an aggressive field program, educating and training its members on the ins and outs of the caucus, supporting a process but not a candidate.

It's a strategy that allows the union to hedge its bet. By delaying an endorsement probably until after the Iowa caucus, the union improves its chances of picking a winner in the Nevada contest about two weeks later. The Culinary has announced it will join with its parent union, UNITE HERE, to make a decision in early January. Endorsing the eventual winner in Nevada on Jan. 19 will preserve an image the Culinary has carefully cultivated, both here and nationally, as the most important endorsement in Nevada.

The Culinary has delighted in the attention. The union's Web site says, "The road to victory in the Nevada Caucus is going to go through us!" The site tracks the numbers of visits the candidates have paid to the union.

To be sure, waiting until after Iowa is not out of step with the Culinary's cautious profile. The union rarely wages an organizing campaign it knows it cannot win.

But by choosing to wait on a presidential endorsement, the Culinary now faces a series of questions it must answer to meet grandiose expectations:

Culinary Secretary-Treasurer D. Taylor said the biggest challenge has been getting members to focus on the caucus during the holiday season.

Still, organizers are framing the caucus meeting process in a union context.

"Our folks are used to caucusing," Taylor said. "We do it all the time in negotiations. If you don't show up at a committee meeting, you're voice won't be heard."

The union's field program is aimed at explaining the differences between a primary election and a caucus. Instead of casting secret ballots at any time during a day, caucus voters must show up at a particular time and place and publicly declare their support for a candidate.

Organizers are going door-to-door to register members and promote the caucus, and the union is hosting training sessions twice a day at its Las Vegas headquarters. The Culinary is also running a direct-mail campaign.

It's not clear, however, how the endorsement, when it comes, will filter down to members, especially given that many have met personally with the major candidates. The three leading campaigns say they count Culinary members among their supporters and volunteers.

How confident is the Culinary in its ability to flip a switch this late in the game and mobilize workers behind a single candidate?

"Time will tell," Taylor said. "It's not like we view the political stuff different than the organizing. It's not like we're starting all over again."

Indeed, the union's strength was on display this year when it went head-to-head with MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment, among others, negotiating new contracts on behalf of 50,000 of the union's members. Almost without exception, the union ran the table in those citywide talks, winning all major demands.

After settling with the major gaming companies, the Culinary took a strike vote to pressure smaller operators to come to the table and deal.

A political election is considerably different. Members' livelihoods are not directly at stake. Instead, workers face a field of charismatic candidates, all of whom are pro-labor. According to the campaigns, some members have already made their decisions.

Nevertheless, Taylor says the union's endorsement will hold considerable sway. "We're very confident that when we decide on a candidate, a very high percentage of our members will go with that candidate," he said.

Finally, the caucus represents a new kind of challenge for the Culinary's political machine, which, in recent years, has been most effective against a single foe in a local election.

The union's last major political victory came during a county commission race in 2006. The incumbent, Republican Lynette Boggs, raised the ire of the Culinary when, as a Las Vegas councilwoman, she joined the board of Station Casinos, a sworn enemy of the union.

The Culinary joined with the local police union to hire a private detective to investigate whether Boggs actually lived in her district. Video footage of her hauling trash cans and picking up the newspaper in her bathrobe at a home outside her district showed up on the evening news. The union followed up with mailers telling voters to throw out the dirty laundry.

Boggs' opponent, school board member Susan Brager, defeated her handily and Boggs has since been indicted on accusations of perjuring herself in election filings.

Arguably, the Culinary single-handedly swayed that election, earning respect as a political power broker.

This take-out-the-enemy strategy has worked well for the Culinary and other unions, but as the Culinary says in recent mailers, a caucus is a "different kind of election."

A negative campaign isn't likely to work in a contest with multiple candidates, all of whom have supported union causes.

Without that laserlike focus on a foe, the Culinary will have to prove itself using sheer organizing abilities, getting members to show up at caucus meetings.

When the union endorsed Democratic state Sen. Dina Titus in last year's governor's race, it waited until a month before the election, awarding a lukewarm endorsement widely seen in political circles as not carrying the full weight of the union's power. Titus lost by 4 percentage points.

Taylor counters by pointing to the Culinary's efforts on behalf of Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's re-election in 1998, a race he won by just 427 votes. Taylor said the union's voter turnout operation made the difference in that campaign - a claim shared by others in the state's Democratic coalition.

Still, the union will benefit from the nature of the caucus, said Pilar Weiss, the union's political director. "It's not an election," she said. "The kind and numbers of people that will turn out for the caucus are different."

Sun reporters Tony Cook and J. Patrick Coolican contributed to this report.