U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez on Wednesday threw the Obama administration’s full support behind Colorado’s Amendment 70, which seeks to raise the state’s minimum wage from $8.31 an hour to $12 an hour by 2020.

“This is one where the nation is watching,” Perez told a round table of workers, business owners and nonprofit and union leaders gathered at Teatulia Tea Bar in Denver. “The President is with you. I am with you.”

Colorado, Arizona, Washington and Maine all have ballot measures to lift the state minimum wage. Perez expressed confidence they would all pass, just as similar measures did in Alaska, Alabama, South Dakota and Nebraska in 2014.

Those last four states are considered red, or Republican leaning. But Perez said voters regardless of all party affiliations realize that low-wage workers are struggling to make it.

“This is is not a Democrat or Republican issue,” Perez said. “No one who works a full-time job should be in poverty.”

Several home health care workers at the round table described their struggles to make it in an industry where jobs are plentiful, the work hard and the wages low.

“I am working 84 hours a week trying to get by,” said April Medina, one of the workers. Having to buy medicine for a sick child can mean missing the rent and paying $40 in late fees, she said.

The Obama administration wants Congress to lift the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25, but has faced Republican opposition, Perez said. Instead, voters state-by-state are lifting wages when asked.

“If there was a time to do a minimum wage hike, it is now,” said Satyam Panday, a U.S. economist with S&P Global Ratings, which released a study on topic Wednesday and doesn’t have a dog in the fight.

Panday said previous research suggests that moderate increases in the minimum wage don’t trigger significant job losses, especially when unemployment is low, as is now the case.

Large employers like Walmart and McDonald’s have lifted their starting wages substantially off the federal minimum, and others are following. That contributed to a 5.2 percent surge in U.S. incomes last year and a sharp decline in the poverty rate.

At $7.25 an hour, the current federal minimum wage is 36 percent of the U.S. median wage, far below the peak ratio of 55 percent reached in 1968. That 36 percent ratio is the lowest of 35 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the study found.

Setting the minimum to median wage ratio at 55 percent would take the federal minimum up to $12 an hour, the hourly rate Amendment 70 seeks for Colorado.

Panday acknowledges that a federal minimum wage hike would cut into profit margins and employment levels at restaurants and retailers, and some of those already struggling will fail. But it is likely their workers will get hired on by employers able to pay the higher wage. A higher minimum could also drawn in workers who have disengaged from the labor force, creating more hiring options.

One way to view a higher minimum wage is as an investment in “human infrastructure,” he said. It will boost worker morale, lifts productivity and to some extent address rising income inequality.

Panday said it is important not to confuse a minimum wage with a living or sustainable wage. Only 3.3 percent of workers make the minimum wage, but there are millions earning just above the minimum wage who will receive a bump up.

Opponents of Amendment 70 have zeroed in on two issues. One is that a flat $12 an hour minimum doesn’t account for economic differences in in Colorado’s urban versus struggling rural areas. Oregon allowed for a tiered system in its wage measure, which was implemented this summer, but the drafters of Amendment 70 rejected that when asked.

Another concern, especially in the food service industry, is that the ballot measure lifts the wage for tipped workers by 70 percent, far more than the 44 percent increase in the overall minimum.

Sonia Riggs, president and CEO of the Colorado Restaurant Association, said that differential worsens the pay gap between workers who collect tips and those who don’t. More restaurateurs may replace tips, which they don’t control, with service charges, which they can distribute more equally. That could reduce the pay servers and bartenders in particular receive.