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Why You Haven’t Heard More About The Minimum Wage This Election Season

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Over the past four months, since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, she and Donald Trump have debated a wide range of economic proposals, from making housing affordable to tax cuts and tariffs. Yet despite inflation and the cost of groceries being one of the biggest issues of this year’s campaign, one thing hasn’t gotten as much attention: increasing the federal minimum wage.

Former President Trump briefly worked the fryer at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in October, but has not publicly supported an increase this election cycle, even avoiding the question when asked about it from a Golden Arches drive-through window. During the 2020 election, he told the press he’d “consider” upping the federal threshold to $15, but has remained quiet about it since. (Project 2025, the conservative policy plan Trump has attempted to distance himself from, would even allow states to file a waiver from following the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage.)

Harris, meanwhile, supported raising the minimum wage during her 2020 run, and since she became the Democratic party nominee in August, but still had not specified by how high as of mid-October. Following Trump’s McDonald’s visit, she told NBC she’d support “at least $15 an hour” as the new federal threshold. She’s since doubled down, telling reporters at a Michigan campaign stop that the current $7.25 minimum amounted to “poverty wages.” That support means “a federal minimum wage increase is far more likely to get passed under a Harris administration,” says Ben Zipperer, senior economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Experts say there are two major reasons the issue hasn’t gotten more airtime: For one, change has been focused at the state level for at least the past 15 years, ever since the last time Congress passed a law enshrining a new minimum wage, which was $7.25 an hour in 2009 ($10.61 in today’s dollars). Meanwhile, those local efforts have vastly narrowed the number of people who still work at or below the federal minimum wage: Just 1.1% of U.S. workers reported doing so in 2023, an all-time low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (And that 1.1% counts people who may actually make more if their tips were included, which they aren’t.)

“Wage legislation on the hill has consistently failed and stalled in Congress,” says Shannon Meade, executive director of the Workplace Policy Institute at Littler Mendelson, one of the largest employment law firms. “What we’ve seen is that states have been stepping up to fill the void, and that’s going to continue” regardless of a Trump or Harris administration.

Indeed, the past 15 years marks the longest stretch that Congress, which has the power to codify the federal minimum wage into law, has gone without raising it since a wage floor was first established in 1940 under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Instead, states have stepped in to push wages up, with 34 states, territories and districts now having minimum wages, nearly all of those above $10.

On Tuesday, voters in three states—Alaska, California and Missouri—will have measures on their ballots to directly increase the minimum wage in their states to anywhere from $14 to $18 an hour.

Two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have additional questions on the ballot regarding tipped wages. (Trump and Harris have both supported eliminating taxes on tips, to the dismay of tax policy wonks.) If passed, Massachusetts would eliminate the state’s lower minimum tipped wage by 2029, requiring employers to start paying $9.60 in 2025, and Arizona employers would be allowed to pay workers a lower hourly wage only if they can prove employees earn, with tips, at least $16.35 per hour.

But whether Trump or Harris wins, Congress would still have to approve a federal wage bump, before a president could sign or veto it. And even a potential Harris administration effort to raise the federal threshold could get shut down if Republicans gain control of the Senate, as they seem likely to do.

It wouldn’t be the first time Congress voted down an increase. Democratic and left-leaning lawmakers have tried to enshrine a $15 minimum into law several times, most recently in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan. But they have been stopped by their Republican counterparts who believe the issue should be left to the states—and a free market—to decide, says Christopher Tang, a professor at UCLA and the faculty director for the Center For Global Management.

Still, it’s a politically popular policy, according to Zipperer. A state ballot question calling for an increase in the minimum wage has not failed since 1996, when voters in Missouri voted against a measure raising the minimum wage there in annual increments, according to Ballotpedia.

Experts say that popularity could be politically effective in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which have higher than average rates of hourly workers paid at or below the federal minimum. “If you don’t push for a minimum wage, workers can easily say ‘well you don’t care about me,’” says Tang. “It’s a fine line between appeasing the workers and small businesses.”

In the absence of federal increases, employers themselves are an alternative for broad-scale change. Propelled by an employee-friendly labor market in the post-pandemic years of 2021 and 2022—as well as increased competition for talent—a number of corporations implemented company-wide minimum wages on a national basis. Bank of America, Costco and Home Depot, for example, all raised their minimum wages to $15 or more since the pandemic. Bank of America has gone as far as committing to raise its minimum wage to $25 per hour by next year.

Such corporate efforts have raised wages to a point where even a slight federal raise, to $9 or $12 an hour, says Tang, may not make that big of a difference. “It’s all about politics,” he adds. “Very few people are making less than $10 an hour. [Raising the minimum wage] is a political statement.”

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