Smart Republicans (there must be a few of them out there, right?) surely must recognize that paying people a liveable wage means they will not need to rely (at least not as heavily as they do now) on public-sector social safety-net programs to make up the difference, in addition to putting more discretionary income into their pockets that they will in turn re-inject into the economy in the form of consumer spending, which benefits everyone.

Unfortunately, 28% of our state's population still appear to be either incredibly stupid, or short-sighted, or both.

Hmm, no crosstabs. Hard to say how many of those polled were Republicans, "self-identified" or registered. And I'm not sure of the significance of the "two oversamples of n=50 interviews were conducted in Legislative Districts 17 and 30. " (Last quote copied from the PDF.) @ COMTE, sorry to say, but it's very possible that it's more than 28% you're worried about. (Not that that should be a surprise, really.)

Goldy, I generally regard any poll taken on behalf of a partisan group as biased, regardless of whether I'm a supporter or not. Independent polling houses have generally consistent biases we can account for without crunching the numbers in detail (i.e., seeing if the percentage of poll respondents corresponds accurately to the percentage of registered voters statewide). Is there more info on that? I'm also interested in why they oversampled the above two districts.

Raising the mim wage at the state level makes a lot more sense than at the city level where it can be easily avoided by local relocation.

Once they raise middle class salaries, then go ahead. Then it can trickle down to $12 burgers to fund the $15/hour wages.

You have GOT to be kidding me! A poll taken by a bunch of UNIONS!? This is evidence that there is "massive support for raising the minimum wage"? But if someone released a poll showing the opposite and it was funded by a college that has a few students who know some students who go out with a woman who used to work for someone who worked for the Koch brothers, the liberals would be screaming "bias!" on the top of their lungs.

Here's a Quinnipiac poll that shows only 18% of Americans want a minimum wage above 10.10/hour: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and…

I know the SStranger (spelled with a double "s" on purpose) has a habit of lying, but this is just absurd.

@2 No, it's not hard to say. They were all self-identified as Republicans, because we have no registration by party in Washington state. (Also, if you click through the link and read the memo, you'll see it specifically says "self-identified Republicans.")

@7
All very good points, but they will be ignored as they always are. I mean, I would LOVE for the SStranger, Sawant or any other "progressive" to talk about socializing the Seahawks because those athletes make "Way too much while people are starving," but it won't happen. They know attacking the Seahawks would be political suicide, and these buffoons are ultimately cowards.

The well-accepted conflation of 'need', qualification for, and utilization of welfare is misguiding.

If you allowed people who make $70,000 to take welfare income, they would.

It would, of course, be a smaller percentage of people than those making $25,000 who take in welfare, but one could easily make the case that this is just as reliant upon the character of the enrollee than the income.

@ 6, I read that. I didn't know (or had forgotten, since I always register as "unaffiliated") that Washington didn't have party registration. Kind of makes it hard to tell if the sample of "self-identified Republicans" corresponds accurately to the number of such voters statewide.

The PDF did NOT say how they asked the question of party identification. Is it just "how do you identify" (in my case, independent) or "how did you vote in 2012" (in my case, straight Democratic ticket)?

This is why crosstabs matter. I'm sorry, but without them the poll is garbage.