The United States has seen an explosion of efforts to raise the minimum wage at the state and local level - both traditionally conservative states like Arkansas and Nebraska and more progressive areas like California, New York, and San Francisco have all raised their minimum wage above the federal standard of $7.25 an hour since 2014. At the heart of this policy momentum stands the Fight for 15, a national movement of labor unions and community leaders who are organizing for $15/hour minimum wage and the right to form a union. Initially dismissed as impossibly high, the $15 an hour wage target is now accepted as a reasonable level in the policy debate about the minimum wage, despite representing a historically unprecedented doubling of the current federal level wage floor (currently $7.25).

Although the role of Fight for 15 remains indisputable in boosting the number of state-level wins and the growing normalization of $15 an hour, the movement’s precise role in shaping the terms of state-level debates around the minimum wage is less well understood. Specifically, there is still much we don’t know about how the Fight for 15 shaped the political discourses in these states, or how it influenced the arguments made by proponents and opponents of the wage increase. Did states with a Fight for 15 presence involve different political discourses than those where the movement did not engage? And did these differences translate into different political outcomes—were states with Fight for 15 engagement more or less likely to pass wage increases than those without? Lastly, is there evidence that states without Fight for 15 engagement also began using similar discourses as those where engagement occurred?