The union’s head is D. Taylor. His actual name is Donald, but his father had that name already, so D. stuck. Taylor put himself through Georgetown University working in the kitchens of preppy bars. His calm voice and mellow mien belie the fact that the 50-year-old is, when I meet him in July, in the midst of heated negotiations with MGM Mirage, the owners of the Bellagio and other Vegas landmarks. It’s not going well. “We’ve met with them 32 times, and we’re going to keep meeting with them,” Taylor tells me in his office, which is adorned with a portrait of César Chávez.

I like that D. Taylor has a role in picking the next president. Local 226 is an exemplary union because it shows that organized labor and growth can be compatible. “You can’t pretend the smokestack industries are coming back, but you can organize the ones that are growing and help them grow,” Taylor says. A Vegas C.W.U. cook makes about 50 percent more than a nonunion one.

In late August, Taylor and his members got most of what they wanted—higher wages and, more important, the chance to organize nonunion workers in the combination condominium-hotels now under construction. Not surprisingly, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton quickly issued statements praising the deal. This all seems good. While most of the big casino operators are being relatively quiet in this election, Local 226 is fighting the good fight.

But here’s my problem: The downside of the Nevada caucuses is that we’re potentially handing our nation’s fate to a state that doesn’t exactly have Iowa’s or New Hampshire’s civic culture—something that’s reflected in those states’ traditionally high voter turnout and the old saw about the Iowan who couldn’t decide whether to vote for a candidate because he’d met him only twice. For the citizens of New Hampshire, civic engagement is in the blood. With 400 members, its state assembly is the largest of any in the country and the third-largest in the English-speaking world.

It’s not that Iowa and New Hampshire are without faults. Thanks to Iowa, we’re on a national binge to make corn-based ethanol, even though it’s not as wise as producing cellulose-based ethanol. (See “Big Green Machines.”) Nevada, though, is lacking in civic culture. Its voter turnout is among the lowest in the country; Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s are among the highest.

Even proud Nevadans can’t be sure what’s next. “We don’t know what Nevada is going to be like, because we’ve never had anything like this,” says politico Billy Vassiliadis, of R&R Partners, the Vegas ad firm that came up with the “What happens here, stays here” slogan. Still, he’s optimistic that the state will pull off a great caucus.

But as one Nevada operative puts it, “This is a place where the prevailing architectural style is literally to build concrete walls between your house and your neighbor’s. How do you overcome that?” You don’t, I think.

And a caucus demands a particularly high level of civic responsibility. When I visited the Nevada State Democratic Party headquarters on a 110-degree day in July, a roomful of volunteers was working the phones to find the 500 to 700 caucus sites that will be needed around the state. (The Republican Party, late to get on the caucus bandwagon, is just beginning to organize.) The major casinos are likely to agree to set up huge at-large stations in their hotels to allow shift workers to caucus without having to go back to their hometowns, marking the first time ever that the American arts of representative democracy and keno will be practiced under one roof.

Since the rules of a caucus can be confusing, the state is at pains to explain how it differs from a primary, even importing experts from Iowa to help run the operation. Instead of voters’ just showing up and casting ballots, Nevadans will gather in groups that support their candidates. There’s haggling, and eventually the delegates are proportioned accordingly. To educate voters, the Democratic Party has sponsored “mockuses,” where Nevadans choose pizza toppings instead of candidates.

I find all of this touching but troubling. There’s something warming about a state built more than any other on rugged individualism trying to build a civic culture like that of Iowa or New Hampshire. The question is whether the rest of us should gamble on Nevada’s developing one in time.