Two years ago, Republicans used the emotional issue of gay marriage to mobilize thousands of their supporters to go to the polls, where they helped elect conservatives to Congress and the White House.

This year, many Democrats contend - and some political observers agree - that calls for raising wages of the poorest workers will motivate thousands of voters and help elect candidates who favor a wage hike.

As was the case with the gay marriage issue, residents in a variety of states will be voting on state referendums about raising the minimum wage, which increases the political impact the issue could have.

Matt Fellowes, a Brookings Institution expert on low-income workers, said the issue's presence on several state ballots this fall, its passage earlier this year in other states and in 22 states overall since the last federal increase a decade ago, suggests the minimum wage's saliency - and potential impact in November.

"In the same way that the Republicans very skillfully used in 2004 the ballot initiatives around gay marriage, here you see Democrats trying to do that with the minimum wage, and some of these states are very politically important too, such as Ohio," Fellowes said.

"What's interesting here is there really has been a flurry of state attention to this issue, and that's happened in the absence of any strong federal initiative around the minimum wage. So I think it's pretty clear that these initiatives will play a role in this year's elections."

Democrats in Congress have long favored raising the minimum wage, saying anyone who works full time should earn a decent living and that it's unfair for profits and executives' salaries to rise while worker pay doesn't.

Democrats in Congress sought to raise the minimum wage this year, but Republicans crafted legislation linking it to repeal of the estate tax, and the measure died.

Norm Ornstein, congressional analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, says Republican legislators initially were gravely concerned about the political fallout - leading to the legislation connected to the estate tax - but that those fears may prove overstated.

"The reason Republicans brought it up in the first place was only because they had a very substantial number of their own members who thought they were going to get killed," he said. "They had raised their own pay, CEO pay had skyrocketed, and the only people getting shafted were the working poor."

But the fact that Republicans pushed for a vote, and that Democrats opposed the bill, provides some cover to GOP candidates in the fall, Ornstein said. In addition, enough other matters are now angering opponents of the administration to lower the impact of minimum wage on turnout, he said.

Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, agrees that issues such as the overall economy, the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq trump the minimum wage in voters' minds. And, he said, "The issue of marriage is a really powerful and emotional issue, while the issue of minimum wage does not generate the same emotion."

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney doesn't buy that, saying the "attempt to tie minimum wage to the estate tax was a big mistake - it's an important issue in Pennsylvania, Missouri and other states."

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