Yes, some will label a Democrat “radical” if they’re on the leading edge of an issue. And?
Will a Democrat be immune from criticism from the right or from the chattering class if they take a more middle-of-the-road position? Not likely! But they’ll get a lot more notice and appreciation from voters who care about an issue if they’re on the leading edge — such as Zohran Mamdani’s calls for universal free childcare and free bus service — rather than if they’re taking a more moderate position.
Simply lead
Bernie Sanders with striking workers in Washington, DC, part of a nationwide “Fight for $15” protest and strike that took place on November 10, 2015
Raising the federal minimum wage is another concrete example of where our Democratic standard-bearers should simply lead rather than attempt to please all sides.
For many (most?) folks who don’t have high incomes, getting a raise resonates more than getting a tax cut. We all remember that in the 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders advocated raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. This wasn’t a rate Sanders had pulled out of his hat. “Fight for $15” had been a grassroots workers’ campaign since 2012. By 2016, both California and New York had passed legislation to raise their minimums to $15.
Hillary Clinton marches in the New York City Pride Parade, June 26, 2016
Despite the momentum and successes of the workers’ movement, frontrunner Hillary Clinton chose to advocate a more modest $12 an hour. Was that three buck moderation worth the price of not demonstrating solidarity with low-wage workers across the country who were protesting for a living wage in the “Fight for $15” movement? While the official party platform negotiated at the Convention did include raising the minimum wage to “at least $15 an hour,” it clearly was not a goal strongly associated with our party’s standard-bearer.
By 2024, many states had decided to boost their minimums to at least $15 an hour, as had a number of large corporations, including Amazon. Yet the federal minimum wage still stood at $7.25, and some states’ minimum wages were just as low, including the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia. It had been eight years since Democrats had made “at least $15 an hour” a party plank, so accounting for inflation it would seem reasonable to push for a higher baseline. In January, 2023, Bernie Sanders advocated just that:
“A couple of years ago, we fought to raise the minimum wage to $15. As a result of inflation, in real dollars, that should be at least $17 right now,” Sanders told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
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Because of extremely high inflation rates over the past year, $15 is about equivalent to $17 now. In fact, $15 an hour was already insufficient in 2021, many activists said; workers have been waging the “Fight for $15” since 2012, and research done in 2021 by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) found that a worker making $15 an hour working 40 hours a week wouldn’t be able to afford to rent an average two bedroom apartment in any state in the U.S.
Kamala Harris at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on November 1, 2024
Kamala Harris’s “Issues” page on her presidential campaign website featured a 13-chapter, 81 page economic policy essay. On page 60, it mentioned that she and Gov. Tim Walz “will fight to raise the minimum wage” but didn’t say by how much. Time after time, when reporters inquired about this figure, the campaign would not provide one. Harris herself finally did, in an interview two weeks before the election, when the topic of the minimum wage was raised after a Trump campaign stunt where he had pretended to work at a McDonald’s:
CNN, October 23, 2024:
While Harris has said for months that she would push to raise the minimum wage, she did not specify a threshold until asked by NBC News on Tuesday.
“At least $15 an hour, but we’ll work with Congress, right? That’s something that is going through Congress,” Harris told NBC as part of its interview [link] with the candidate.
She didn’t propose a baseline any different from the 2016 platform. Even so, simply by stating that one number, there was a burst of news stories about Harris’s desire to see the federal minimum wage boosted, which was surely a better projection of leadership than the campaign’s earlier reticence to specify a dollar figure.
I’m not claiming that the 2016 or 2024 elections hinged on our candidates’ clearly advocating for a $15 or $17 (or higher) minimum wage, though I do think this was a missed opportunity for our standard-bearers. In my opinion, it doesn’t hurt — it helps — for our candidates to be on the leading edge of issues. It seems to me that the leading edge is the place where a leader looks most like a leader.
