Will Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto remember her roots?

UniteHERE president D. Taylor exhorts campaign workers.

Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was named head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) this past week. The job entails leading the charge to win enough Senate seats in 2020 to flip the upper chamber.

According to the Nevada Independent, the freshman Senator (elected in 2016) was eager to take the job.

Cortez Masto said that she was courted to take over the DSCC, but also showed interest in taking the role. Typically the Senate Democratic leader has to beg and plead for a member to take the position because of the intense travel and fundraising duties it entails.

... Cortez Masto is the first Latina elected to the Senate and is only the second woman to be DSCC chair.

She's an interesting choice. In the past when Democrats were in the minority, they tended to choose Senators who were well-connected fundraisers: from 2003 through 2011, the post was occupied by Jon Corzine (D-NJ, Goldman Sachs), Chuck Schumer (D-NY, Wall Street) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ, personal graft). Like any sitting Senator, Cortez Masto has raised millions of political dollars, but according to the campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets, her big donors are Emily's List, the League of Conservation Voters, and J Street. These are all fine Democratic-leaning organizations, but not where the big bucks are located.

Cortez Masto has another attribute unmentioned in the news coverage: as much as any member of the Senate, she certainly knows that she owes her election to the work of the labor movement, to the Culinary Workers in Las Vegas and in Reno (UniteHERE). Democrats win in Nevada when this powerful union turns out low wage workers, many of them Latinx, who are not habitual voters. Culinary just did this again for a new Democratic Senator, Jackie Rosen, and a new Democratic Governor, Steve Sisolak. There are plenty of other worthy civil society organizing groups and a state Democratic party in Nevada, but the Silver State's elections are turned by the Culinary Workers. Because the union allocates its members' money toward these fights, it doesn't have to chase fickle donors and is largely free to follow its own model of campaigning through door to door canvassing in what is (somewhat surprisingly) one of the most urbanized of states.

So that's the background Cortez Masto brings to the DSCC. Will her experience of the power of labor and of canvassing-based campaigns affect her approach to assisting Democratic Senate campaigns? One certainly hopes so. There's a healthy potential partnership in that mix.

Full disclosure that will not be news to most of my readers: I worked for two months on the UniteHERE campaign in Reno this fall.