With the Obamacare rollout falling short of expectations, it looks as though Democrats have hastily found a new mascot for the 2014 midterm elections: a minimum wage hike.
Notable party leaders, including President Barack Obama, are at the helm of support for an increase in the country’s minimum wage, hoping to gain traction with midterm voters by exploiting an increasingly popular issue.
“The fact is, the [economic] recovery has still been very bad for many Americans,” Scarpinato said. “So we welcome a discussion about how bad all of the Obama policies have been in this economy and how much they’ve hurt folks in the middle class.”
But while the minimum wage discussion is intended to lure voters to the polls in November, it could end up backfiring. Republicans are prepared — and eager — to talk shop about the economy. Democrats could inadvertently hand a beacon of hope to Republicans who are just waiting for the right chance to not only showcase the damaging effects Obamacare has on small businesses, but highlight a poverty rate which has remained stagnant under Obama’s administration.
“If they [Democrats] want to make the election about the economy, which I think is the direction that they are trying to go, that just shows how desperate they are to run on anything other than Obamacare,” Daniel Scarpinato, national press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Red Alert Politics.
Democrats are going to have to share the issue of the economy with Republicans this year, as Scarpinato said the Republican strategy includes promoting higher wages by growing the economy, creating jobs and helping small businesses by eliminating Obamacare mandates that threaten employers with the looming threat of laying off workers.
The problem Republicans face is that being the party audibly against raising the minimum wage doesn’t sound like a good idea politically, at least superficially. The true test for Republicans will be if they can successfully reach voters when it comes to explaining the repercussions raising the minimum wage would have on those it’s intended to help.
“The people who ultimately pay the bill for this are the less-skilled, less-experienced workers who no longer have their foot on the first wrung on the job market,” Michael Saltsman, research director at the Employment Policies Institute, told Red Alert Politics.
And with about half of minimum wage employees working at small businesses, the issue isn’t just confined to corporations.
“It really is small businesses that end up footing the bill for the electoral strategy of the Democrats in 2014,” Saltsman said.
The Democrats’ portray their Party as one that advocates for low-income families and individuals, but they have yet to openly promote reforms to help low-income voters — aside from the obvious plan of raising the minimum wage, that is.
“Washington Democrats have shown almost no interest for five years in working together on ways to create the kind of good, stable, high-paying jobs that people really want and need,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor on Tuesday.
“It’s only when you believe a government is the answer to all of your problems that you talk about unemployment insurance instead of job creation, and the minimum wage instead of helping people reach their maximum potential,” he added.
But Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) promised in October that the Democrats would run on the Affordable Care Act, and to her credit, she wasn’t exactly wrong. Democrats’ strong fixation on the minimum wage isn’t a surefire way to avoid issues with healthcare mandate completely.
“People are already seeing their hours cut back because of the Affordable Care Act,” Saltsman said. “The last thing we need is making entry-level employees even more expensive by creating a higher minimum wage.”
