Labor unions and groups that fight poverty are typically among the strongest backers of higher minimum wages, and employer groups are often the ones lobbying against significant pay increases.

In addition to raising the standard minimum wage, many of these same organizations have pushed to end the even-lower base pay for tipped workers as well as the subminimum wage for certain types of workers, such as people with disabilities.

Built-in inflation mechanisms have become a popular feature of recent minimum wage updates, in part to prevent extended stretches of stagnation, as on the federal level.

“Indexing is definitely a really good policy to make sure that workers’ paychecks are not as impacted by what we’re going through right now,” in terms of inflation, the National Employment Law Project’s Yannet Lathrop said.

However, indexing remains far from universally accepted, even among Democrats.

First-year Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, championed an economic agenda that, among other things, called for accelerating a $15 minimum wage not set to take effect until 2025 and linking future increases to inflation. The Democratic-led legislature is on the verge of signing off on speeding things up, but the state Senate omitted the inflation component — likely killing it for the year — over concerns it would take power away from lawmakers and let wages rise on autopilot.

Likewise, a New Mexico bill to tether the state’s $12 an hour minimum wage to inflation stalled in committee after a pair of Democrats joined Republicans to vote against the measure.

State Rep. Miguel P. García, a Democrat who sponsored NM HB 28, said he felt that it was a missed opportunity to ensure workers get raises without hiking businesses’ labor costs at irregular intervals.

“That has dramatic impacts on businesses, especially smaller businesses,” he said in an interview. “At the same time Covid kind of created this paradigm shift where we cannot take our lower paid workforce for granted.”

While minimum wage increases regularly hit snags in statehouses across the country, advocates have found success at the ballot box when they have gotten to ask the question directly — including in conservative states.

In November, Nebraska voters approved an initiative to raise its minimum wage from $9 to $15 by 2026 and tie it to the consumer price index from then on by a 59 to 41 percent margin. That proposal even included a $1.50 hike that went into effect just weeks after results were tallied.

Voters in states like Arkansas and Florida have also approved minimum wage boosts by wide margins in recent years.

Just the threat of a ballot question has proven useful to advocates in some states. Aho, of 1199 SEIU in Massachusetts, said that the 2018 deal brokered by the state’s Republican governor at the time, Charlie Baker, and the Democrat-controlled legislature came about in an effort to head off a trio of ballot questions — one of which included the state’s minimum wage.

“We’ve seen this to be a bipartisan issue; everyone wants to be able to take care of themselves and their family,” Aho said.