Americans Support a $15 Minimum Wage, Regardless of whether it gets Republican Support
by Bennett Fleming-Wood (Class of 2021), Brendan Hartnett (Class of 2023) and Aadhya Shivakumar (Class of 2022)
Joe Biden campaigned for his 2020 victory on a range of liberal policies, including increasing the national minimum wage to $15 an hour. Biden had good reason to emphasize his support for raising the minimum wage, as the policy is widely supported by voters: a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 60% of registered voters support a $15 minimum wage. Support is even higher amongst Democrats, with 82% supporting the policy.
While the passage of the American Rescue Plan was monumental for the working- and middle-class, the provision to raise the national minimum wage to $15 an hour was struck down by the senate parliamentarian. This puts the $15 minimum wage in a precarious situation. Unlike when it was included in the COVID-19 relief bill, where it would have required only a simple majority in the Senate to pass, now 60 senators are required to raise the minimum raise. Thus, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour — a hallmark of Biden’s campaign — will require bipartisanship in the Senate.
Democratic senators and pundits have already expressed frustration that the American Rescue Plan, which didn’t include a $15 minimum wage or other progressive policies, failed to get any Republican votes despite this omission, indicating that bipartisanship may prove futile. For Democrats to compromise on the minimum wage would mark a significant disconnect between voters and politicians. While a $11 minimum wage is supported by about 71% of Americans, a majority of Americans support a $15 minimum wage.
Noticing the disconnect between senators and voters, we ran a survey experiment to examine if bipartisanship has an impact on public opinion regarding raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. We wanted to test if bipartisanship matters to voters on an issue as salient as the minimum wage, and if it is more impactful when bipartisanship exists among voters or senators. Thus, we included information about support for a $15 minimum wage among both Republican voters and Republican senators, that, in our experiment, varied randomly.
We told respondents that nearly all Democratic senators support the bill. Then, we informed them that [random integer, 0–10] Republican senators and [random integer, 25–55] percent of Republican voters support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. These random integers correspond to current polling on Republican voters’ support for a $15 minimum wage and intricacies of senators who may support a $15 minimum wage.
We found that 61% of respondents supported raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Our experiment did not produce results that suggest bipartisan support — either in the Senate or among voters — impacts voters’ support for raising the minimum wage. Instead, variation in support is attributed to partisanship. Democrats were most supportive of a $15 minimum wage, with 82% of Democrats indicating support for the policy. This compares to 60% of Independents and 36% of Republicans, levels consistent with other polls.
Most Democrats supported a $15 minimum wage. Depending upon the number of Republican senators and voters said to support the bill, between 65–90% of Democrats supported the legislation. While there was variation, it appears to be random, lacking a strong correlation, indicating that indications of bipartisan support does not affect Democrats’ support of this policy.
While Republican’s support for a $15 minimum wage varied in our experiment, it was rarely supported by a majority of respondents. This ranged between 15–60% depending upon the number of senators and republican voters said to support the bill. There is a slight increase in support among respondents when the number of senators and percent of voters increases, though it is a relatively insignificant trend. This indicates that Republicans’ stance on the minimum wage is salient and unchanging, regardless of support indicated by Republican senators or fellow-Republican voters.
In a subsequent regression model, we found that the number of Republican senators and percent of Republican voters in support of the bill did not have a statistically significant impact on support for the bill. However, we found that the respondent’s political party did have a large effect on support for the bill.
It is possible that respondents knew the numbers of senators and percent of Republican voters we told them were in support of the minimum wage was arbitrary. When this poll ran in late-February, the senate parliamentarian made national headlines as she struck down a provision in President Biden’s American Rescue Plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, making it possible that most respondents were familiar with the politics of the minimum wage.
However, our findings are consistent with other polls regarding the minimum wage that did not employ a vignette and were conducted before the minimum wage debate was in the headlines. This indicates that voters simply have fixed views on this salient issue. It is unlikely that respondents entered our survey with an open-mind regarding the minimum wage. This would explain why the amount of bipartisan support likely did not matter, as respondents already held a strong, pre-existing belief regarding a $15 minimum wage.
With high support among the public, the issue passing the minimum wage appears to lie in senators voting records, rather than beliefs held by the public. 61.1% of voters want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, yet all Republican senators and a handful of Democratic senators have voted against it. Joe Manchin (D-WV), arguably the most powerful senator as a conservative Democrat in a 50–50 Senate, is holding firm that he will not support a minimum wage above $11 an hour; Biden’s promise to pass a $15 minimum wage therefore faces slim changes in his first term — even if the filibuster is suspended. Yet, the high-level of public support for a $15 minimum wage indicates the issue truly lies in the Senate.
