Democrats say minimum-wage battles to help 2014 turnout

Fredreka Schouten | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Democrats hope a slew of potential ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage next year in key states will drive up voter turnout and help their party in midterm congressional elections.

Advocates of wage increases are pushing 2014 ballot measures in several states, including Massachusetts, Idaho, Alaska and South Dakota. Legislative campaigns are planned in other states, including Illinois.

Last week, New Jersey voters overwhelmingly approved an increase in the state's minimum hourly rate by $1 to $8.25. It became the fifth state to hike its minimum wage this year, joining California, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The flurry of state efforts comes as President Obama and some congressional Democrats push an increase of the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, unchanged since 2009. In February, Obama proposed raising the hourly rate to $9, but it has not gained traction in the GOP-led House. House Speaker John Boehner has said it would result in fewer jobs.

The White House recently endorsed a separate measure by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that would hike the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2015 in several increments.

"The refusal to increase the minimum wage is just one of the ways House Republicans have inflicted harm on the economy and hurt people's pocketbooks," said New York Rep. Steve Israel, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "2014 is going to be a referendum on who has helped the middle class and who has hurt the middle class."

Israel said a dozen key House races could benefit from higher turnout in states where Democrats and labor activists are pushing the wage increases. In Illinois alone, he predicted, the issue could influence the outcome of five seats.

Republicans counter that the Affordable Care Act and the flawed rollout of the federal government's online health insurance marketplace will be the topic that dominates midterm races.

"If I had a dollar for every time Democrats thought their issue of the week was going to be their pathway to victory, I would have enough money to pay taxpayers back all the money that was wasted on the broken Obamacare website," said Andrea Bozek, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.

Republicans "are more concerned about how to create jobs and are less inclined to create artificial market prices, which is what increasing the minimum wage will do," said Chris Jankowski, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which works on state races.

A Gallup poll released this week shows 76% of Americans say they would vote to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour. That's up from 71% in March.

In all, 3.6 million workers earn wages at or below the federal minimum, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Tipped employees, full-time students and some disabled workers are among those exempt from federal-wage laws.) Altogether, workers younger than 25 account for about half the number of those earning the minimum wage or less.

Turnout typically drops for young people, lower-income workers and minorities in midterm elections, said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and an expert on election turnout. Overall, 41.7% of eligible voters cast ballots in 2010 — the most recent midterm election — down from 62.2% in the 2008 presidential election year, McDonald's figures show.

"It's not the first time Democrats and labor have used the strategy to try and gin up turnout and increase excitement about the election among key constituencies," McDonald said. Ballot initiatives alone may not be the decisive factor, he said, but political parties use them as a tool to frame the election.

"It's as much about persuasion as it is mobilization," he said.

Research conducted in 2006 by the Ballot Initiatives Strategy Center, which promotes liberal ballot measures, found that interest in that year's election was high among key Democratic voting blocs in several states — Missouri, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada — where minimum-wage ballot initiatives also won voter approval.

That year, Democrats claimed control of the House and Senate.

Next year, House Democrats face a tough path in their effort win the 17 seats they would need to take the majority in that chamber. In the Senate, Republicans need a net gain of six seats to shift control to their party. Among their top Democratic targets: an open seat in South Dakota and the seat held by Alaska Sen. Mark Begich — both states where activists are pushing wage measures.

Given the partisan gridlock in Washington, the state-level initiatives offer the best tool to address wage stagnation, said Michael Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO's political director.

"We're going to be aggressive in pushing for it not because of its electoral implications but because it will lead to higher living standards," he said.

Business groups, which say the increases drive up costs and slow hiring, say they will work just as aggressively to defeat the measures. "This will have a deep and disproportionate impact on small businesses," said Eric Reller, a spokesman for the 350,000-member National Federation of Independent Business.

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