Bernie Sanders resoundingly won the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, taking 47 percent of the vote count and two-thirds of the available delegates in a crowded field. Sanders won five out of the seven caucuses on the Las Vegas Strip, tying the sixth and coming in second at the last. These sites cater primarily to taxi drivers and service workers at the region’s biggest casinos. These victories were especially significant because even after the leadership of Nevada’s influential UNITE HERE Local 226, or the Culinary, repeatedly attacked Sanders, rank-and-file members of the union supported him far more than any other candidate.

The Culinary is perhaps the most powerful political force in Nevada. The union, made up largely of immigrants and people of color, has an extremely admirable history of shop-floor militancy and concrete wins. Its members — housekeepers, casino workers, and service staff on the Las Vegas Strip — have taken on organized crime and some of the world’s richest corporations and won. It has done all this in a historically low-wage sector with high turnover in a state with laws unfavorable to unions. Because of members’ long history of activism and loyalty to the union, the Culinary is widely seen as a power player in Nevada politics. Every candidate in the Democratic primary would have loved the union’s endorsement.

In the end, the Culinary issued no endorsement. Instead, the union’s secretary-treasurer, Geoconda Argüello-Kline, gave a bizarre press conference a few days before the caucuses in which she said the union was “going to endorse our goals. . . . We are not going to endorse a candidate.” While there was officially no endorsement, Argüello-Kline referred to Joe Biden as “our friend” and repeatedly claimed Bernie Sanders supporters were harassing her and other members of the union.