Democrats Are Ignoring a Rising Problem in the Middle of a Revolution

As a candidate for president and in the early days of his administration, President Joe Biden made raising the national minimum wage to $15 per hour a cornerstone of his campaign. Fighting for his job in 2024, however, Biden has all but stopped discussing it as part of his platform early in the campaign, held back by a reluctant Congress and a challenging electoral map that could leave control of the government teetering on a knife's edge in next year's elections.

Weeks before the 2020 election, Biden unveiled an ambitious economic agenda with the nation's low-wage workers at its center. He pledged an end to sub-minimum wage salaries for those with disabilities, and a strengthening of benefits requirements for employers. He proposed an end to the tipped minimum wage. Most importantly, he adopted the rhetoric of "living wage" advocates who had long pushed for minimum earnings requirements they claimed would allow Americans to live with dignity, and reduce their reliance on public benefits.

"It's long past time we raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour," he tweeted February 2, 2021. "The American Rescue Plan will get it done."

But even with his party in control of Congress at the time, Biden failed to live up to that pledge.

While the president has successfully used the power of his office to increase the minimum wage for federal employees to $15 per hour—and made increasing the minimum wage a centerpiece of his 2022 State of the Union address—Congress has proven less willing to follow along, even as the current national rate of $7.25 hasn't budged in 14 years.

It's not completely Biden's fault. Even though Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress at the time, Senator Bernie Sanders' 2021 "Raise the Wage Act," went nowhere due to Democrats' razor-thin margin in the Senate, which was too narrow to overcome the 60-vote threshold necessary to thwart a filibuster. Biden's push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour through the American Rescue Plan was voted down by eight members of his own party, who crossed the aisle to kill the proposal with the backing of all 50 of their Republican colleagues.

Economic calamity post-COVID only added to Biden's challenges, as his administration sought to slow the speed of a rapidly expanding economy and skyrocketing levels of inflation. This stemmed any appetite for drastic changes to the economy.

There are signs things are beginning to improve. Inflation is slowing, according to the most recently available economic data, while the rates of the country's still-expanding labor market are finally beginning to decline.

However, as his administration has sought to tout its successes through an initiative called "Bidenomics," critics have argued his administration will not have achieved its promises until it follows through on the pledges it made on the campaign trail in 2020, including a higher minimum wage and programs like student loan debt forgiveness.

Recent polling shows persistent pessimism about the state of the economy. A June 30 survey conducted for The New York Times found 52 percent of American adults saying they were worse off financially than they were a year ago, the highest percentage in five years. That same month, the University of Michigan's index of consumer sentiment—a standard bearer of the economic attitudes of the nation—hit the lowest level in its 70-year history.

It's still early in the election cycle. However those trends, experts say, could bode poorly for Biden and the Democrats in 2024 if they seek to bolster enthusiasm among working- class voters, particularly those of color disproportionately represented in low-wage industries.

"Minimum wage policy is still a very important issue for working people and poor voters and, therefore, for candidates," Yannet Lathrop, policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, told Newsweek in an interview. "A majority of voters are supportive of a higher minimum wage, even in the $20 range, especially in the context of inflation and going inflation, it makes sense. And voters are going to prioritize that as a main issue."

Data supports that claim. A 2021 Gallup poll, for example, showed roughly six in 10 U.S. adults in favor of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 40 percent who "strongly" backed the idea.

A more recent survey conducted in April by the University of Maryland School of Public Policy's Program for Public Consultation found bipartisan majorities supported raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, while 65 percent of those surveyed favored a phased-in minimum wage increase to $15 over a period of five years, including approximately 41 percent of Republicans.

White House messaging, meanwhile, has not risen to meet the challenge.

While the Biden administration has touted marginal growth in the real hourly wage over the past year of his administration—2.2 percent, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—those wages have still not kept up with the cost of living, drawing criticism even from those traditionally within the Democratic coalition who felt they should be doing more.

"Maybe people don't measure the quality of their lives and the state of their country by whether 'the real average hourly wage is nearly 2 percent higher,'" liberal columnist and occasional Newsweek contributor Nathan J. Robinson wrote on Twitter this week. "I swear to god wonkish liberals seem like they've never met a real person."

Others placed the blame directly on Biden and his party.

"Dear Dem voters: Biden and the Democrats have decided to leave the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour," tweeted Anthony Zenkus, University of Columbia professor who lectures on income inequality. "Please stop making excuses for the pain they continue to cause the working class."

Newsweek has reached out to the Biden campaign via email for comment. But other candidates in the Democratic field have also danced around the issue.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently his closest challenger in the Democratic primary race, has not committed to backing a $15 minimum wage, stating only that he believed "people should have a living wage in this country" in a June interview on the Breaking Points podcast. (Newsweek has reached out to Kennedy's campaign for comment.)

Others, however, have remained supportive. Marianne Williamson, another Democratic presidential hopeful, had previously been a vocal supporter of a national $15 minimum wage, regularly advocating for it on her social media pages in the early days of the Biden administration. Today, increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour remains part of her platform, with the caveat the federal government should provide subsidies during a transitional period for industries where the increase was too large a jump to make immediately.

Biden, Lathrop said, could soon be confronted by growing enthusiasm within his party to support an increase to the federal minimum wage, forcing him to take a more vocal position on an increase as voters prepare to hit the polls in 2024.

Sanders has already announced plans in Congress to introduce legislation supporting a $17 minimum wage, while leading figures in the Democratic Party such as Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom—both of whom are considered likely future contenders for the presidency—have already signed legislation increasing their states' minimum wages.

In Arizona, efforts are underfoot to boost a November 2024 ballot initiative that would raise the state's minimum wage to as much as $18 an hour, joining a burgeoning list of activist efforts to raise the wage independent of Congress.

"Eventually, I think those will make their way into the national conversation," said Lathrop. "Again, it makes sense. Inflation is a huge, huge problem for folks right now. It's making the cost of living much higher for everyone, especially for those who can least afford the increases in the prices of goods and services. An increase in the minimum wage is a policy that could help alleviate some of the harmful effects of high inflation. It makes sense that the public will support these sorts of policies."