What The Hell America!

In the wake of the Democrats’ devastating election loss to Donald Trump, everyone is trying to figure out how to rebuild a broad coalition of working-class voters that the party, shockingly, lost to a Republican billionaire last November.

“We just have to decide if we want to win elections or not,” Sen. Chris Murphy recently said. “And in order to win elections, all across this country, we’re gonna have to build a coalition with some people who don’t line up with us on a host of really important issues.”

Many in the broad Democratic coalition have put forward a variety of their own answers for how to do this, from rejecting progressive activists and talking about patriotism and “main streets” to kicking trans people to the curb, even though trans issues were way down at the very bottom of voters’ most important issues. But what if the answer was something simpler? Something that has proven popular across partisan and ideological lines, would throw specifically working-class Americans a lifeline while living costs surge, and which has already shown to be an electoral winner? What if the answer to winning over workers, in other words, is to run on an actual pro-worker policy?

I’m talking about raising the minimum wage.

For more than ten years, the demand was to hike the federal minimum from the lowly $7.25 an hour it is now to $15. But the ravages of inflation — first the steady, normal rate of the second half of the last decade, then the turbocharged rate of the last four years — means that figure now should be at least $20 an hour, which would still only translate to $41,600 a year for a full-time wage worker (and many wage workers don’t work full-time hours).

Besides being just the plain right thing to do, a minimum wage hike is an obvious, no-frills, easy-to-understand response to people’s struggles in the era of inflation: “Having trouble keeping up with costs? We’ll lift up your paycheck by making sure your boss pays you what you’re worth.”

You could even point to the fact that minimum wage hikes tend to have a positive knock-on effect on the earnings of those making more than the minimum wage, which means the paychecks of all workers stand to benefit from this policy.

It’s a policy that reaped dividends for the progressive Morena government in neighboring Mexico, one of the few left political parties to win reelection in the inflation era. Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s nearly tripling of the minimum wage over the course of his term has been widely credited as key to his government’s successful reduction of poverty, which was in turn the bedrock of his party’s reelection — along with his successor (and current president) Claudia Sheinbaum’s campaign promise to raise it even further, which she has made good on.

But you don’t have to look over the border. The cross-partisan popularity of the policy is clear from the many times the policy has become law in red states over the years, not even at the hands of lawmakers, but often by being directly voted through by US voters. In just this past election, supposedly a great red wave, both Missouri and Alaska raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour by ballot measure. In 2020, Florida — these days thought of as the Trumpiest of states — saw its residents give more votes to the idea than it gave to either presidential candidate.

Ten states and the District of Columbia already have a minimum wage of $15 an hour or more, while another six are set to exceed $15 by 2027, including the solid-blue state of Illinois, the purple state of Michigan, and the solid-red state of Nebraska. Another four — both the solidly Democratic Maine and Oregon, the more recently blue Colorado, and the purple Arizona — are tipped to hit that milestone thanks to annual inflation adjustments in law.

Forget about the $15 figure for a moment, and twenty-one states are seeing a minimum wage hike in general this year, on top of the thirty whose rate is already higher than the federal floor — a clear demonstration of the general popularity of passing laws that ensure people are paid more money for the work they do.

This policy would specifically help the very same diverse, multiracial, working-class voters that are now ardently contested by both parties, and which Democrats in particular have lost support among. The nearly forty million US workers who earn less than $17 an hour — or a little over $35,000 on a full-time schedule — include roughly one-third of Latino and black workers, one-fifth of white workers, and two out of five working single parents. Of the 9.2 million workers who are seeing minimum wage hikes this year, one-fifth are in families whose income is below the poverty line.

Polling bears this out, with survey after survey after survey consistently finding that large majorities of voters across the partisan and ideological spectrum back raising the minimum wage, sometimes to $15 an hour, sometimes to $17 an hour — and sometimes even more. One 2023 survey of nearly three thousand Americans by the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy found a $15 an hour hike was backed by two-thirds of voters, and that even though only 41 percent of Republicans backed it, robust majorities of Republican women, people of color, and workers making less than $50,000 a year were in favor.

This would serve double duty in also being a great piece of political jiujitsu for Democrats, who could challenge Republicans to support their efforts to raise the wage, and so make its passage through Congress much easier, and relentlessly hammer them on it if they don’t — not just in press releases no one will read, but in every public and media appearance made by any Democratic official. Trump has certainly given them a wide open lane to do this, dodging a question about raising it during a publicity stunt at McDonald’s, suggesting at one point it shouldn’t even exist, and appointing a Treasury secretary who opposes the idea.

For the Democrats, it’s worth remembering that only one of their presidential campaigns has won in the past decade. It wasn’t the 2016 effort of Hillary Clinton, who refused to adopt $15 an hour as her policy. And it wasn’t this past year’s run by Kamala Harris, who endorsed a $15 an hour minimum wage only three weeks before voting, then proceeded to never talk about it in speeches, the debate, or other public appearances.

It was the 2020 run by Joe Biden, which made a $15 per hour wage policy a prominent part of its platform from the start and which saw the candidate get into a high-profile argument about it with Trump in a presidential debate, coming only a year after a Democrat-controlled House passed a $15 minimum wage bill. This is one reason why it was such political malpractice for Biden and Democrats to punt on passing the measure into law when they actually got the chance to do so in 2021, blaming their failure on the powerless Senate Parliamentarian — someone the hosts of Pod Save America, a Democratic Party–aligned podcast, recently admitted Democrats should have simply ignored.

A major minimum wage hike is far from the only policy Democrats should pursue. You could throw paid sick leave, rent control, and Medicare for All in there as well, to name just a few. But it’s such a blindly obvious solution to the question of how to stitch together a cross-section of working-class voters across ideological lines that it beggars belief it even has to be explained. If you see a politician or pundit talking about winning the support of working-class Americans without putting a serious minimum wage hike front and center, don’t bother taking them seriously.