The Democrats' progressive turn.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment - Viewpoint essay

As they often do when the next election approaches, Democratic candidates and party strategists have begun moving to the left, trying to capture some populist fire in the hopes it will propel them into office.

The issue the Democrats are seizing on for 2014 is an increase in the minimum wage.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats are getting behind the bills by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10, and are backing state-level efforts to raise minimum wages, especially in states with contested Congressional seats.

"It puts Republicans on the wrong side of an important value issue when it comes to fairness," Dan Pfeiffer, one of Obama's senior advisers, told The New York Times.

Indeed, like their willingness to throw 1.3 million people off long-term unemployment insurance right after Christmas, the Republicans' opposition to increasing the minimum wage casts them in a cartoonishly villainous light.

Worse, the same Congressional Scrooges who withheld those unemployment benefits refused to even consider raising taxes on the super rich, who are doing better than ever.

Americans see the widening gap between a gilded elite that has recently enjoyed a stock market surge and the vast majority of working Americans who have watched their wages shrink, their job prospects dim, and their college aspirations buried under crushing debt.

The Democrats recognize a good political issue when they see one.

"The more Republicans obsess on repealing the Affordable Care Act and the more we focus on rebuilding the middle class with a minimum-wage increase, the more voters will support our candidates," Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told the Times.

There is much truth in this. A majority of Americans--even those who would not benefit directly-see the justice in a minimum-wage increase. A recent CBS News poll shows 64 percent of independents and 57 percent of Republicans support raising the minimum wage.

And there is a growing body of research that finds, contrary to the objections of the Chamber of Commerce and Republican politicians, that raising the minimum wage does not have a depressing effect on employment, that it actually helps employers by reducing turnover, and generally aids, rather than harms, business and the economy.

But the federal effort to raise the minimum wage, like the Affordable Care Act, is likely to yield a partial...