I had to be in the Southwest Las Vegas office at 11am to report to the manager. 11am is early in Las Vegas, by all accounts. The office is 20 minutes away in a car, but takes an hour and a half by public transport. An easy choice, I’m sure you’ll agree.
The buses were all perfectly on time, air conditioned, clean, with wide windows for views of the red mountains that surround Las Vegas. The sun was out, the sky was clear – I love this place. The relatively few riders were incredibly diverse – wheelchair users, the elderly, mothers, young people, black, white, latinx. All travelling together in transport paid for publicly. These are Bernie’s people.
Not that the public transport is anything like what we would call a good service, holistically speaking. The buses all run every half hour at best, and they barely run through the city centre, which is dominated by these 6, 8, 12-lane freeways. The car culture is probably the most striking thing about residential life in Vegas. Obviously you know about it in theory but I wasn’t prepared for how alienating it was coming out of London. Nobody walks. If you don’t have a car, you just can’t move.
This has a completely corrosive impact on the rest of the culture. You have these massive food deserts – somebody joked to me that you’d starve to death before you reach food in the suburbs. Buildings are miles away from each other, and masses of land is dedicated to parking. Everything is completely stretched out – really the whole city could be a quarter of the size, like dragging the corners of an image in Photoshop.
And people are just in their cars, all the time. Smoking. Ordering food. Like they have an exoskeleton.
The Bernie office is in a block beside one of Vegas’ bits of massive undeveloped land just outside the city centre. It’s like the desert poking through cracks in civilisation.
The field office was again really lovely, everyone very friendly. I got a quick lesson in using the canvassing app MiniVAN (which felt utterly revolutionary after battling wind and rain to scribble on boards in December), and then I was straight out to knock doors to Get Out The Early Vote.
I went out on a two-person shift with the lovely Justin from Chicago, who had a great story to tell. He had been working a shitty retail job in January when he heard about Neil Peart, the drummer of Rush’s, death. He didn’t bother going into work the next day. That’s when he saw a Facebook post about a Bernie supporters’ house in Iowa. So he said fuck it, and left. While in Iowa, someone came up to his field office from Project Veritas and threatened them all with a mass shooting. It didn’t stop them coming in, and the mass shooting never occurred. While in Iowa, he bought a second hand camper-van, which he, ahem, redesigned. He drove it across America to Las Vegas.
When we reached his car, there were to police cars flanking it. Turned out he’d unknowingly parked it outside some Culinary Union (remember the name) offices, and they had told the police as they’d been receiving death threats from ‘Bernie supporters’ (we’re sceptical this wasn’t Trump trolls).
Canvassing was good fun, although very hot and sweaty. We were in a latinx area, and lots of the people who answered the door couldn’t speak English – equally, I couldn’t speak Spanish. This was a bit frustrating, obviously it’s not the worse thing in the world for me but these people deserved to be talked to, and I couldn’t do it. There was plenty of positive reception though – Bernie is currently polling at 40%+ of latinx in the state, and we think his popularity amongst this demographic could be one of the big stories coming out of Nevada, going into California, and generally for the whole primary.
The houses, even in this relatively poor neighbourhood, are all massively spread apart, with big driveways, bungalows. This is what the whole of Las Vegas’ housing looks like. Virtually nothing is more than two storeys, everything is detached. In the richer areas, almost all the communities are gated, and the houses even further apart. Shaun tells me that people in the suburbs only usually stay for about 6 months before moving. This is prime architecture for fascism. If you neighbour was taken away in the night, you wouldn’t even know their name.
In the late afternoon, I was to join the SW team organising for the Strip Caucus. What is the Strip Caucus? It is not a parlour game for politics nerds. Nor is it where you could find me at 3am last night.
The Strip Caucus is the satellite caucus held for those workers who work on the Las Vegas Strip, who might not be able to make it back home to vote in their precinct, so are given the chance to vote while at work (literally in the casinos). This is a massive deal. The Strip Caucus makes up 2% of the whole of Nevada’s state delegates. Because of reasons, it has disproportionately assigned delegates, so each vote is worth more. We’re feeling confident about North Nevada (which Bernie won last time), confident about the rest of Las Vegas – but the Strip Caucus (which Hilary overwhelming won last time) is complicated.
The Las Vegas Strip is a microcosm of America, in the sense that behind the glitz and size and wealth, the whole thing runs off cheap immigrant labour. And the bosses know it, which is why the union that organises workers on the strip is one of the most powerful unions in the country – the Culinary Union. The Culinary Union does a great job for its 60,000 workers – they have healthcare without deductibles, a hospital just for them (apparently the best one in the state) and contract language shielding immigrants from ICE.
But the Culinary Union leaders, while not endorsing a different candidate, have been distributing flyers to their members criticising Sanders’ Medicare for All plans. ‘They have great union healthcare; they don’t want to lose it.’
This is an odd position to learn of as a Brit. Not having to bargain for healthcare will give unions more leverage to focus on wages et al. In fact, it’s written into Bernie’s bill that firms must reenter federally supervised bargaining to reallocate the savings back to workers. The good doctors and health infrastructure in the area are not going to be liquidated. If a Culinary worker is fired, they will no longer be stripped of their healthcare. Free healthcare across the country will benefit poor, working people the most. But of course this can be argued respectfully, without resorting to what some Sanders supporters have directed at the Culinary leadership over the last week.
The solution, as always with the Sanders campaign, is to talk to people face to face and empower them to talk to the colleagues face to face. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to talk to the workers as they enter and exit their shifts, making sure they know when the satellite caucus is, and if they support Bernie trying to get them to be a leader in their workplace, organising others to come out and be delegate-rich supervoters!
But we’re also going to try and find out exactly what Culinary have been telling them, and potentially try to dissuade them of the advice of their excellent, trusted union. And, naturally, we were going to be doing it in the employee parking lots at the back of the casinos, trying to keep out the way of the security guards who patrol the area. This is guerrilla canvassing. This is the Strip Caucus.
I was driven from the briefing meeting in SW into the Strip by Kyle. Kyle is every bit the American ‘Kyle.’
Arizona accent. Cap backwards. Muscular. Drives a sports car. His Dad voted Trump. A few years ago he was in danger of going down the libertarian rabbit-hole but was saved by YouTubers like TWT and Kyle Kulinski. Can now analyse Vegas’ sub-economies better than Marx. He’s a top guy, Kyle. Told me a story about how he once had a gun held to his head. He says politicians don’t understand guns, so (although he hates gun culture) he doesn’t trust them to be able to legislate the problem away. For example, if you ban AR-15s, people will just use the other gun they have lying around – and the next most popular gun is the 30 ought 6, which’ll blow through not one metal classroom door, but four. He thinks gun laws as they’re talked about now would just give the police an excuse to go into poor black people’s houses and throw them against the wall.
Kyle also tells me that in the US, British stabbings make the nightly news, and are used to defend current gun policy – the regulated Brits have homicides too, or something. I found this completely stunning – and actually sickening – that along with every thing else, the families of the victims of knife crime in this country, without even knowing it, have their loved one’s memory used to prop up racist, right-wing policies analogous to those that lead to knife crime in the UK. I fucking hate this place.
There had been an error with the scouting of locations, so Kyle and I did not actually manage to find a suitable spot to canvass. You’ll have to wait for the next blog to learn what happened when I Strip Caucus Canvassed the next morning at 8 am! Instead we just drove around the Strip and the back of the Strip looking for spots, which was fascinating enough in itself. The Strip is completely, completely off the charts. I’ll write more about it in another blog, but it’s a bit like Disneyland for adult giants. One hotel/casino is called the Venetian, and has built a cheap Rialto-knockoff bridge over a road. They haven’t even bothered to put a fake canal in. Actual Venice will be underwater in 10 years so this is going to be the closest tourists can get.
Driving home in the dark we nearly ran over a lone Pizza Hut deliverer on a bicycle, in an only nominally high-vis jacket, trying to turn left across 6 lanes.
Not to be all moralising, but this city is in need of some redemption. Next Saturday they have a chance.
mini moralia 