In an election in which the merest hint of association with President Obama seemed radioactive to Republican voters, one of his signature issues was embraced Tuesday in some of the country’s most solidly red states: raising the minimum wage.þþMinimum wage ballot measures in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota were supposed to build on the White House’s enthusiasm for the issue, bringing liberal voters to the polls and improving the chances of vulnerable Democratic candidates.þþInstead, voters ousted Democratic incumbents and supported the minimum wage increases with equal gusto.þþThe apparent contradiction left Democrats, who earlier this year believed the minimum wage would allow them to shape the national conversation, wondering where they had gone wrong. Was their support for the measures too tepid, or the proposed increases too modest? Or was it simply that Republican candidates had managed to neutralize an issue with strong bipartisan appeal by stepping up in support of the measures themselves?þþSupport for raising the minimum wage runs high. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in September, 70 percent of the public supported raising it to $10.10 an hour from $7.25, as the president has proposed. Democrats and independents were strongly in favor of the proposal, while Republicans were about evenly divided, with 50 percent in favor and 48 percent against.þþIf the ballot measures on Tuesday were any measure, the issue has become unmoored from partisan politics. They passed by margins of 10 to 38 points. In Illinois, where the minimum wage measure was nonbinding, it passed by 33 points, but the Democratic incumbent still lost the governor’s race.þþMike Lux, a Democratic strategist who has worked on numerous ballot initiatives, said Democrats had been too hesitant to tie their prospects to the minimum wage. Speaking of Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, a Democrat who was defeated, he said: “Candidates like Pryor, their main message in their ads and their speeches was (a) I’m not Obama, and (b) the Republican is awful. They didn’t really run a campaign on the issues they were fighting for at all. And I think that was a huge flaw.”þþBut local advocates in several states said Democrats had been vocal supporters of the wage increases. The issue was so popular that Republicans sought in some races to neutralize Democrats by softening their own stance.þþThe Republican challenger for the Senate in Alaska, Dan Sullivan, said before the primary that he would oppose the measure. In September, he reversed his position.þþIn Arkansas, the Republican candidates for governor and the Senate, Asa Hutchinson and Tom Cotton, waited until September to say they favored the measure.þþIn South Dakota, top Republican candidates who opposed the increase often avoided the topic, said Zach Crago, the executive director of the state Democratic Party. Mitch Krebs, the spokesman for the victorious Republican Senate candidate, Mike Rounds, said Mr. Rounds was against this measure but had supported previous minimum wage increases.þþThe statewide wage measures were modest compared with those passed in affluent cities like San Francisco, where voters approved an increase to $15 an hour. Alaska’s measure would raise the minimum wage to $9.75 by 2016, Arkansas’s to $8.50 by 2017, Nebraska’s to $9 by 2016 and South Dakota’s to $8.50 by 2015.þþJudy Conti, the federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, said the measures might not have been ambitious enough to help Democrats.þþAmong supporters of a higher minimum wage, she said, raising it to $10.10 often elicits more fervor than raising it to $9, while opponents do not differentiate between the two options.þþResearch is mixed on whether ballot measures drive turnout or help candidates, said John Matsusaka, the executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California.þþ“The people who you’re trying to swing here have the ability to hold in their minds ideas which you might find contradictory,” he said. Indeed, Republican voters in several states saw no contradiction in supporting a Democratic initiative.þþ“What are those single moms and poor kids supposed to live off of? Two jobs?” said Kathleen Smith, 68, a retiree in Cabot, Ark., who voted a straight Republican ticket as well as for the minimum wage increase. “It’s about time that we give those kids a leg up.”þþJohn Small, a conservative who owns a radio station in Brandon, S.D., said he had voted to raise the wage. “People can be conservative and still have a heart, too, which isn’t always portrayed in the media,” he said.þþHe added that $8.50 seemed reasonable: “If it was an increase to $15 an hour, as it was in parts of the country, you would have seen a different outcome. But it’s a dollar.”þþ
Source: NY Times
