Jon Ostendorff

Citizen-Times

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Thom Tillis said on MSNBC Wednesday paying workers in the North Carolina mountains the same minimum wage as workers in Boston "makes no sense."

He made the comments in an interview on The Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd.

"I believe that minimum wage decisions need to be the made by the state. Barack Obama and Kay Hagan think that the minimum wage needs to be the same in the mountains of North Carolina and the in city of Boston it makes no sense to me," Tillis said on the show. "It's a decision that needs to be made closest to - with the people closest to the situation. And I think that's states legislatures."

More than half of North Carolinians support raising the minimum wage, according to a new Elon University poll.

Raising the minimum wage to $10 got support from 45 percent of voters. Fourteen percent said it should be increased to $9.

Tillis won the GOP primary on Tuesday. He faces U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan in the fall.

Her campaign blasted his comments.

"So much for the 'establishment candidate.' In his first national television interview of the general election Thom Tillis stumbled out of the gate and showed again why he is an unelectable, fringe candidate," said Chris Hayden, Hagan Campaign Spokesman. "Tillis refused to walk back his deeply offensive "divide and conquer" remarks that show he is out of touch with North Carolina values, and he refused to answer whether the Legislature he leads should raise North Carolina's minimum wage. Tillis is wasting no time proving to the outside special interests who dragged him to the finish line last night that he will be their proxy in their war against North Carolina's middle class families."

Tillis' campaign was not immediately available.