At a campaign event in Iowa on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton officially established a clear difference between her and the two remaining Democratic presidential contenders. She declared her support for raising the federal minimum wage to $12. "That would be setting it at a level that would be equivalent to the point in our history where the minimum wage was at its highest," (which was 1968) Clinton said.
Her rivals, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, both support the labor movement's call for a $15 federal minimum, which has already taken hold in a number of big American cities.
Clinton's support for a more modest minimum wage hike is not surprising. She has long said that she thinks a national $15 standard isn't flexible enough to work in rural areas and cities with lower costs of living. She backs a higher wage in more high-cost locales.
Her plan fits into-and helps define-the Democratic mainstream. As I've previously reported, a $12 federal minimum wage has emerged as the Congressional Democrats' plan. In early summer, Senator Patty Murray and Representative Robert Scott introduced legislation for a $12 minimum, which garnered support from such prominent Democrats as Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi. (Pelosi, however, has since come out in support of a $15 minimum).
While most labor unions publicly call for a $15 minimum wage, it has not been a deciding factor in the endorsement decisions of the major unions that have already thrown their support to Clinton. The most notable union that has so far withheld an endorsement is SEIU, which has invested huge sums in its nationwide Fight for 15 efforts. The union says that it's still conducting its endorsement process and hasn't been clear on what policy factors will be considered.
Clinton's minimum wage policy decision may be indicative of her looking ahead to the general election. According to a recent survey, there's broad support for raising the minimum wage to $12.50 by 2020. It polls well across party lines, too: 92 percent of Democrats support it while 73 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans back it as well. And in Tacoma, Washington, on Tuesday, voters approved a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage to $12, while rejecting a competing measure to up the minimum to $15 for employees of bigger businesses.
Though a $15 minimum enjoys 63 percent of national support, the move is riskier politically. Economists are divided over how high a minimum wage the economy can handle. There's rather strong evidence that the economy can handle incremental increases to something close to $12. A statement released by a group of 200 economists, however, discounted the risks of raising the standard to $15.
While Clinton's campaign has been tacking to the left on a number of issues in response to the surging popularity of Sanders's progressive policies, it seems that her team is confident that staking out her support for $12 is not going to hurt her in the primaries.
