Democrats Should Constantly Talk About a Minimum Wage Hike
An obvious way to win the support of the working class is to support some actual pro-worker policies. An obvious starting point: raising the minimum wage, and well above $15 an hour.
Workers from the fast-food, home care, and child care industries protest outside a McDonald’s restaurant as they demand a nationwide $15-an-hour minimum wage, in Los Angeles, California. (Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images)
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?
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