GOP candidates can’t always make the minimum wage issue go away by switching sides. Why Dems are winning on min. wage

For Republicans this year, the minimum wage is the wedge issue from hell.

Even as Democrats lurch toward a potentially disastrous midterm election, support for raising the federal minimum wage is resonating with voters. In fact, it may be the only issue on which Democrats are winning: A Pew Research Center poll earlier this year found 90 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans favored raising the federal minimum to $10.10 from its current $7.25, as proposed by President Barack Obama.


Four Republican-leaning states have state-level minimum wage increases on the ballot this year — Alaska ($9.75), Arkansas ($8.50), Nebraska ($9), and South Dakota ($8.50) — and the increases will likely pass in all four. The same goes for a non-binding Illinois referendum on raising the minimum wage to $10. Democrats anticipate these measures will boost Democratic turnout in all five states, particularly among African-Americans.

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“It gives Democrats a concrete offer on what is increasingly seen as the main problem,” says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. “Jobs that don’t pay enough to live on … people know what a struggle it is for low-wage workers.”

Republicans remain confident they’ll retake the Senate, but that’s partly because some have defused the issue by endorsing the ballot measures. As recently as January, Alaska Republican challenger Dan Sullivan said, “Raising the minimum wage isn’t an answer” even as his Democratic opponent, Sen. Mark Begich, backed Obama’s proposed federal increase to $10.10. By September, though, Sullivan was telling The Wall Street Journal he would vote for the Alaska increase “because it is a state-driven initiative.” Afterwards, Sullivan, who’d trailed Begich much of the summer, widened his lead by two or three points.

Similarly, in Arkansas, the Republican Senate challenger, Rep. Tom Cotton, was silent on that state’s proposed hike for much of the year before declaring in September that, like his Democratic opponent, Sen. Mark Pryor, he would vote for the Arkansas pay hike. Republican former Rep. Asa Hutchinson, who’s running for Arkansas governor, did the same. In the House, Cotton voted against hiking the federal minimum. Hutchinson previously opposed the ballot measure.

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Pryor, the rare Democrat who opposes the federal increase, skipped the April Senate vote for a tour of Arkansas tornado damage with the president. Cotton took the lead soon after, and widened it after he endorsed the higher state minimum. Hutchinson consistently polls ahead of his Democratic opponent, former Democratic Rep. Mike Ross.

GOP candidates can’t always make the issue go away by switching sides. Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, the former chairman of a private-equity firm, started out favoring either eliminating the state’s minimum wage or reducing it from $8.25 to $7.25 (which is what the federal minimum is). Later Rauner said he preferred raising the national minimum (because raising the state minimum might give an advantage to neighboring states with lower minimums) but that he would support raising the state minimum if certain conditions were met.

For neither the federal nor the state minimum did Rauner specify how high he’d raise it. That left Rauner’s Democratic opponent, Gov. Pat Quinn, an opening to attack. Quinn, who spent a week last summer attempting to live on the minimum wage, has built much of his campaign around the issue. Polls show the race is very close.

Even in states that don’t have minimum wage on the ballot, opposition to an increase may put some Republicans at risk. “I think it’s playing quite successfully as a wedge issue,” says Arun Ivatury, campaign strategist for the National Employment Law Project Action Fund.

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Ivatury thinks the issue may weigh heavily in Wisconsin, where Republican governor Scott Walker is in a dead heat against Democrat Mary Burke, a former state commerce secretary. Walker caught heat for telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he didn’t think the minimum wage “serves a purpose” and for certifying, through the state’s Department of Workforce Development, that Wisconsin’s current $7.25 minimum constitutes a “living wage.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said recently on MSNBC that “It’s not been tough for us to get volunteers in Wisconsin, because this guy is known as an anti-worker governor.”

In the Iowa and North Carolina Senate races, Ivatury notes, Republican candidates are getting attacked for questioning the necessity of a federal minimum wage — and both races remain fairly close.

Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst has recently denied ever saying she opposed a federal minimum (the public record contradicts her), and now says only that she doesn’t want to raise it. In her race to fill retiring Sen. Tom Harkin’s seat, she’s running slightly ahead of Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley, who supports the federal increase to $10.10.

In North Carolina, Republican state House Speaker Thom Tillis first said any minimum set an “artificial threshold” that “drives up costs.” Then he retreated to saying he thought wage minimums ought to be set not by the federal government but by each state — while refusing to say whether North Carolina’s minimum should be raised. The federal minimum, he said, should not be; his opponent, Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, favors raising it to $10.10. Hagan is running slightly ahead.

The left-leaning Public Policy Polling released a survey earlier this month that asked voters whether they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate who opposed a minimum wage increase. Substantial proportions in Illinois (30 percent), Iowa (23 percent), and Wisconsin (19 percent) said they would.

The percentages were smaller in North Carolina (6 percent) and in Kentucky (8 percent), where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who leads in a close race, has promised to block an increase in the federal minimum, while the Democratic challenger, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, favors $10.10. Grimes’s position was undercut somewhat by the revelation that she’d served as an attorney for her family’s hamburger restaurant, which pays minimum wage, after a former employee sued after taking a fall. Previously Grimes had denied any connection to the business.

The proposed federal minimum wage increase likely won’t clear Congress next year, even if the Democrats keep the Senate. Indeed, the bill’s two principal Democratic sponsors, Iowa’s Harkin and California Rep. George Miller, will both retire at the end of this year. But that’s hardly the end of the matter. Asked which Democrats will press the issue in Harkin and Miller’s absence, Labor Secretary Tom Perez chuckled and said, “I have no doubt there will be many takers.”

If a minimum-wage raise is such a slam dunk for Democrats, why didn’t Obama press the issue when he was up for reelection in 2012? At the very least, it would have created discomfort for Mitt Romney, who was on record favoring future automatic increases tied to the cost of living — a position unpopular with his right flank, even though it would rob Democrats of future wedge opportunities. Romney muddied his position in 2012 by saying he now favored tying future increases to multiple economic indicators, but Obama might have pushed him into an outright flip-flop.

Harkin and Miller were both pressing for $10.10 in 2012, and Ralph Nader lashed out at Obama for abandoning his 2008 pledge to raise the federal minimum to $9.50. Even after the election passed, Obama proposed an increase only to $9 before settling on $10.10 one year later.

The reason for Obama’s hesitancy was that unemployment averaged 8.1 percent in 2012 and 7.4 percent in 2013. Obama’s economic advisers believe now, and believed then, that a minimum wage increase to $10.10 wouldn’t increase unemployment. Indeed, Obama’s then-chief economic adviser, Alan Krueger, had co-authored one of the most-cited studies demonstrating why this was so. Rather, the concern was political: White House aides worried that pushing a minimum-wage increase at that moment would alienate small business and push independents into the Republican column. After the election, the White House worried it would create unnecessary conflict with a Congress already in outright rebellion.

Another factor was that the federal minimum had already risen in 2009. Although that increase was legislated under Obama’s predecessor, not everyone was aware of that. Nor are they still. In his best-selling 2014 inequality book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” the French economist Thomas Piketty credits Obama with bringing about the 2009 hike to $7.25. Piketty has promised that will be corrected in future editions.

With unemployment now below 6 percent, Obama and other Democrats feel much freer to shift the discussion from joblessness to a living wage. What a difference two years make.