Despite his clumsy expression, I’m going to go ahead and venture that, yes, most Republicans would probably agree with Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn that a person that works a solid forty hours per week at an honest, productive job should not have to live in poverty. That’s precisely why it would be nice if hiking the minimum wage was actually a constructive way to boost employment, median incomes, and economic growth, instead of an counterproductive and intellectually cheap populist band-aid. Via NRO:

Taking up the Democrats’ national strategy, it looks like Quinn is hoping to make the minimum wage a central issue in his own reelection campaign and is hoping to get the state measure passed — an especially popular issue with Big Labor, and Quinn is going to need all of their support he can get. He has some of the lowest approval ratings of any governor in the country, and it looks like the newly nominated Republican businessman Bruce Rauner is going to give him quite the run for his money and perhaps some Scott-Walker-ish competition, via Eliana Johnson:

Rauner set unions on edge during the primary campaign, criticizing their leaders and pledging to reform the state’s bankrupt pension system. “The government-union bosses are at the core of our spending problem in Illinois,” he said in a primary debate, arguing public unions create a “conflict of interest for the taxpayers” and have made a mess of the state fisc.

Rauner’s targets didn’t take it lying down: The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Illinois Education Association, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the Democratic Governors Association spent north of $3 million attacking him and trying to divert votes to one of Rauner’s primary opponents, state senator Kirk Dillard.

That’s far more than Democrats spent — $1.2 million — trying to steer Republican votes to Todd Akin in the 2012 Senate primary in Missouri, where Akin was viewed as the weakest candidate to take on vulnerable Democrat Claire McCaskill.