In state after state, labor unions and community groups have pushed lawmakers to raise the minimum wage, but those efforts have faltered in many places where Republicans control the legislature.
Frustrated by this, workers’ advocates have bypassed the legislature and placed a minimum-wage increase on the ballot in several red states — and they are confident that voters will approve those measures on Tuesday.
In Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, binding referendums would raise the state minimum wage above the $7.25 an hour mandated by the federal government.
These measures are so overwhelmingly popular in some states, notably Alaska and Arkansas, that the opposition has hardly put up a fight.
“These groups have noticed that minimum-wage increases can easily pass — they have seen this in the past few years,” said John G. Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California. “They can’t get it through the legislatures in these red states, so they do it this way.”
Some Republicans say that the main reason for these initiatives is to mobilize low-income voters to help re-elect embattled Democrats, like Senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska. But supporters deny this, saying they are pushing to raise the minimum because so many workers are struggling and because the minimum wage has trailed inflation.
The measures in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota would set the minimum wage lower than the $10.10 an hour that President Obama has asked Congress to pass, to no avail. The ballot initiatives in Arkansas and South Dakota call for a minimum of $8.50 an hour, while Nebraska’s would go to $9 and Alaska’s to $9.75.
Zach Polett, campaign director of Arkansas Fair Share, the advocacy group backing the $8.50 minimum wage there, said some advocates were seeking a higher number.
“We decided to go with a level that had broad support in Arkansas,” he said. “We were looking to start where the state is. We’re not New York, California or Seattle. We are the South.”
Seattle has adopted a measure that will raise its minimum wage to $15 in several stages, while San Franciscans will vote on Tuesday whether to approve a $15 minimum wage. Residents in nearby Oakland will vote on a $12.25 wage.
In a surprising twist, hardly any business groups in San Francisco are opposing the $15 proposal, which is expected to pass easily.
“There’s been the conflict about gentrification and the pushback around the tech industry, and a good part of the business sector has been looking for ways to defuse some of the issue,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley. “They see this as one way.”
Nonetheless, one group posted a billboard in San Francisco with a picture of a giant touch screen saying, “Hello, may I take your order?” To the right of the screen, the text reads, “With a new $15 minimum wage, employees will be replaced by less costly, automated alternatives.”
The billboard was placed by the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit organization set up by Richard Berman, a prominent anti-union lobbyist.
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Ed Flanagan, a former state labor commissioner in Alaska, said he and two other former labor commissioners had overseen an effort to get the minimum-wage initiative on the ballot because in their view the state’s $7.75-an-hour minimum wage was too low, considering the high cost of living there.
“We’ve gone from having the highest minimum wage in the country to being 19th, behind even Florida and Arizona,” Mr. Flanagan said. “I’m not claiming that $9.75 is a living wage in a state like Alaska.”
Dennis DeWitt heads one of the few groups to campaign against the $9.75 initiative, the Alaska chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business.
“All the data show that this would kill entry-level jobs, which means the unemployment level for our young people will go up,” he said. “This $2 increase will consume the budget that small businesses have to pay their employees.”
But, Mr. Flanagan said, many studies have shown that a minimum-wage increase does not reduce jobs. He noted that the Alaska initiative exempts teenagers under 18 who work fewer than 30 hours a week — the federal minimum wage instead would apply.
Jackson T. Stephens Jr., the founder of Exoxemis, a biotechnology company in Arkansas, sued to get the initiative thrown off the state’s ballot. He said that the signature of a notary public had been forged, which should have disqualified thousands of the signatures collected, and he challenged the secretary of state’s decision to give advocates additional time to collect more signatures. The state’s Supreme Court rejected his challenge and let the $8.50 measure stay on the ballot.
Mr. Stephens, who is chairman of the Club for Growth, the conservative policy organization, said the initiative was a cover for other political activities, like Democrats’ get-out-the-vote efforts. He complained that outside union money was behind it.
But having lost the lawsuit, he said, he was not fighting the ballot measure any further.
“This is an overwhelmingly popular initiative,” he said, noting that Republican and Democratic lawmakers have endorsed it. “This thing is going to pass whether I jump up and down or spend all my money.”
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The National Education Association, the giant teachers’ union, has contributed $800,000 to the Arkansas initiative.
Explaining why her union contributed the money, Karen White, the N.E.A.’s political director, said, “This will help many students and parents support their families, and we have a lot of fellow educators — food service providers, custodians, adjunct professors — who don’t earn a living wage.”
Illinois has a nonbinding ballot initiative that calls for a $10 minimum wage. Jessica Angus, the campaign manager of Raise Illinois, the coalition behind the effort, said her group had identified 336,000 minimum-wage voters and had knocked on one million doors.
“We expect that we will have a mandate for the legislature to increase the minimum wage immediately,” Ms. Angus said, noting that the minimum wage had become a major issue in the Illinois governor’s race.
There is also a nonbinding referendum vote in Wisconsin, where residents in nine counties will vote on whether to raise the state’s minimum to $10.10 an hour.
Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, has been one of the most vocal skeptics of San Francisco’s $15 proposal, although her group has not officially opposed it.
“We have expressed a lot of concern, like a lot of small businesses, about how are they going to adjust to a 40 percent increase in the minimum wage,” she said, noting that the city’s current minimum wage is $10.74.
She voiced dismay that the $15 measure did not create a lower minimum wage for tipped workers, like waiters, who she said sometimes made more than $100,000 a year. She predicted that more restaurants would put a flat service charge on all bills, some of which would be shared with workers in the kitchen.
But then, sounding much like a supporter, Ms. Borden acknowledged that not even $15 was a living wage in San Francisco.
“It’s not in the business community’s interest for the minimum wage to increase, but there is an understanding why it needs to increase,” she said.
An earlier version of this article misstated the terms of a nonbinding ballot initiative in Illinois. The initiative calls for a minimum wage of $10 an hour, not $10.65.