The Silver State Firewall: Aaron Ford, the Culinary Union and Nevada's First Black Governor

Southern Black Organizers · Post-Election Series · The Sunbelt Spear, Part 3 of 4

Aaron Ford will be Nevada's first Black governor. He is also the first Black governor ever elected west of the Mississippi River. On Tuesday, the state's attorney general defeated Gov. Joe Lombardo, 51.5 percent to 44.2 percent, despite being outspent on television.

Ford's win is a Sunbelt story about labor. In Las Vegas, the organizing machine is not a church network or a county party. It is a union of housekeepers, cooks, porters and bartenders, many of them immigrants and women of color.

The Union That Knows How to Win

The Culinary Workers Union Local 226, Nevada's largest union, celebrates its ninetieth anniversary this year. Its members knock doors in every election, and they have learned to deliver. "Culinary Union is the largest union in Nevada and we know how to win, but we can't do it alone," Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge said on Wednesday. "Aaron Ford will be a governor for the people. He will be united with workers when it gets tough, whether we're on strike or fighting the boss."

The union framed the race around paychecks. Visitor volume to Las Vegas fell 7.5 percent in 2025 and stayed flat through September 2026, which cut hours for hospitality workers. Union leaders blamed mass deportations and rising costs for keeping travelers away. Two Culinary members won seats in the legislature on Tuesday.

Who the Culinary Union Is

The union's makeup explains its reach. Culinary Local 226 and its sister Bartenders Union Local 165, both affiliates of UNITE HERE, represent about 60,000 workers in Las Vegas and Reno, including at most of the casino resorts on the Strip and downtown. They are guest room attendants, cocktail and food servers, porters, bellmen, cooks, bartenders, and laundry and kitchen workers.

The membership is majority women (55 percent) and majority immigrant (60 percent). By the union's count it is about 54 percent Latino, 18 percent white, 15 percent Asian, 12 percent Black and less than 1 percent Indigenous. Members come from 178 countries and speak more than 40 languages, which makes Culinary the largest Latino, Black, Asian American and immigrant organization in Nevada. Its Citizenship Project has helped more than 18,000 immigrants become citizens, and new voters, since 2001.

That power was built on the picket line. Membership grew from 18,000 in 1987 to 60,000 today. The 1984 citywide walkout shut down much of the Strip, and the Frontier strike lasted six years, four months and ten days, one of the longest in American history. The union's health fund now covers more than 120,000 Nevadans. Because members trust the union with their health care and their paychecks, they listen when it knocks on doors at election time.

A Historic Sweep

Ford carried a whole slate with him. Democrats flipped three Republican-held statewide offices and held the other three, sweeping all six for the first time since John F. Kennedy was president. Nicole Cannizzaro won the attorney general's office Ford is leaving. Cisco Aguilar kept the secretary of state's office. The union also credited Teresa Benitez-Thompson's projected win in the 2nd Congressional District, which would make her the first Democrat to hold it.

From Texas to the Westside

Ford was born in Dallas in 1972 and grew up in Texas. He earned his bachelor's degree at Texas A&M University and a master's in international education at George Washington University, and he taught public-school math. His professional training came at The Ohio State University, where he earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in educational administration and his law degree from the Moritz College of Law. He clerked for federal judges Denise Page Hood in Michigan and Johnnie B. Rawlinson on the Ninth Circuit before practicing law in Las Vegas. He became the first Black majority leader of the Nevada Senate and then the first Black attorney general in the state's history. His climb follows the path of Las Vegas's Historic Westside, the neighborhood where Black families were confined under segregation and where civil rights organizers forced the Strip to integrate in 1960. Ford's victory carries that history to the governor's office.

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Labor and the Black-Brown Coalition

Nevada shows a different version of the same formula. In Georgia, Black-led groups built the machine. In Texas, Black and Latino organizers worked side by side. In Nevada, a multiracial union did it, with Black and Latino workers at its core. Each time, the common thread is people who organize between elections, not only during them.