Why do people think Democrats should campaign on raising minimum wage?
This was, I believe brought up in last weeks episode with Faiz Shakir and I've seen it said a lot on Reddit and various other places. There seems to be many people that think raising the minimum wage should be a core component of the Democratic message and would have possibly pushed Harris over the top.
I don't understand this because the only people that were helped in the past few years post covid, were the bottom 20% of wage earners. This and the very top were the only groups that didn't see their wage gains eaten up by inflation. So I keep asking myself why people think that this would be a good campaign strategy right now, because we just did effectively raise minimum wage, through market forces by giving everyone money. Predictably in hindsight, when you give people a bunch of money for nothing, and force a bunch of employees to stop working, the people doing really unpleasant low wage jobs stop doing them and if they've been laid off, they refuse to come back unless they get paid more. This seems to me like it had mostly the same effect that raising the minimum wage would have.
And the kicker is, America obviously hated this. Inflation is the main reason people gave for voting against Harris.
So please, explain to me ,given this economic reality and the corresponding electoral reality, why would raising the minimum wage be a good policy for Democrats to have focused on?
edit:
Here is a source for my thesis. https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2022/
Here is a good breakdown on the cost of a hamburger