When we met in his office at the sprawling and somewhat ramshackle Las Vegas headquarters of Culinary Union Local 226 last Monday, a day when the New York Times averages of the polls in the seven swing states had Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in Nevada by less than 1 percent, Ted Pappageorge wasn’t buying it.

“We don’t really believe the polls,” said Pappageorge, who’s the secretary-treasurer of Culinary, as the local is commonly called. “Trump’s people generally under-poll, and if we had an election today, I think Trump wins.”

“But it’s not today,” he continued. “We’ve got three weeks to go and the Culinary army is out there, going to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors and talk to hundreds of thousands of people.”

In the context of actually existing American politics, the designation of his canvassers as an army is not an overstatement. With 60,000 members—the vast majority of them housekeepers and the wait and kitchen staffers at Las Vegas’s mega-hotel/casinos—Culinary may well be the largest local union of any kind in the United States. For several decades, hundreds of its members have taken an election leave from their jobs to knock on the doors of local registered voters and engage them in discussions of the candidates. It’s a full-time job. For a few, it lasts the better part of an election year; for some, it runs from summer to Election Day; and for the rest of the 400-plus who walk the precincts, it’s a monthlong gig for seven days a week.

In the pandemic year of 2020, when candidates and parties and outside groups and even other unions all eschewed canvassing, Culinary—almost all of whose members were jobless as the hotel/casinos had shuttered their doors—fielded canvassers who still went out in force, masked with special gear devised by epidemiologists. By Election Day, they’d contacted fully half of Nevada’s Black and Latino voters, and one-third of the state’s Asian voters, too.

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