With Donald Trump headed to the White House and Congress controlled by Republicans, many are hearing the death knell for the campaign to raise the federal minimum wage.

Hillary Clinton and Democrats have supported lifting the minimum wage, which has been $7.25 an hour since 2009, but Republicans have shown little interest in a change. Trump has expressed contradictory opinions — first calling American wages “too high,’’ then backpedaling to say the minimum wage should stay the same, and later voicing support for a $10 federal minimum.

Even if the effort to raise the federal minimum wage isn’t dead, it appears to be on “semi-permanent intensive care,’’ said Lew Finfer, cochairman of Raise Up Massachusetts, the community coalition that led the successful effort to raise the state’s minimum wage.

Yet support for higher wages cuts across party lines. Working class voters who feel left behind by the economy turned out in droves for Trump, in hopes that his policies could improve their financial situations, and many of them backed a higher minimum wage in state ballot initiatives.

“Trump voters who are worried about economic inequality voted with us on the minimum wage,’’ said Harris Gruman, Massachusetts political director for the Service Employees International Union, a leader in the national Fight for $15 movement to raise the minimum wage.

Voters in four states, including the Trump stronghold of Arizona, passed ballot measures on Nov. 8 to raise their minimum wages to $12 and above, among the highest rates in the country. In several Maine counties where Trump won handily, the majority of voters supported raising the minimum wage by a wide margin.

States have led the way on raising the minimum wage for decades, and when a minimum wage raise is on the ballot, whether in a red or a blue state, it wins. The last time a minimum raise referendum was defeated was in Missouri in 1996.

In many states that are at the federal minimum, such as New Hampshire, wages can’t be raised by ballot initiatives. And in red states, which most of them are, that leaves the matter largely in the hands of Republican lawmakers who tend to oppose increases, saying they raise costs for businesses, leading to layoffs, fewer new hires, and higher prices.

“The minimum wage is probably the clearest example of a policy where the majority of ordinary working Americans are calling for action and some so-called elites in Washington, specifically Republican members of Congress, are ignoring them,’’ said David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. “If Trump really wants to be a champion of the working people, he should press for a raise in the federal minimum wage.’’

Several Republican legislators have signaled they are open to a higher minimum wage, including Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, who recently came out in favor of a $15 minimum. And after Clinton’s stunning loss to Trump, Democrats are realizing they need to go further to address the deep economic frustration of working class people, said Paul Sonn, general counsel at the National Employment Law Project, a New York advocacy group for low-wage workers. And that means a stronger push for a $15 minimum.

“It’s really becoming the centerpiece of the national progressive economic platform,’’ Sonn said.

For decades, the federal minimum wage rose regularly, but after it remained stuck at $3.35 for most of the 1980s and high inflation eroded its value, states started taking action on their own. In the past two years alone, 21 states and Washington, D.C., have changed their minimum wage laws, and groups in six states — including Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire — are considering campaigns to raise the minimum wage over the next two years.

But simply leaving the minimum wage up to the states is insufficient, workers’ advocates say, because it can lead to vast regional disparities. In Massachusetts, for instance, minimum wage workers will earn $11 an hour next year, while Maine is on the path to $12 an hour. Next door in New Hampshire, however, the wage floor is $7.25 an hour.

Matthew McDonald, a 36-year-old Congregationalist minister outside Bangor, Maine, was among those who voted for Trump and for raising the minimum wage. McDonald was an avid Bernie Sanders supporter who “felt the Bern and all that jazz’’ before he switched his allegiance to Trump because of his promise to crack down on free trade deals. McDonald, the son of a former union leader at a paper mill, has seen the state’s economy decimated by lower-priced imports that shuttered many mills.

As a result, many families at his church rely on food pantries and heating assistance to get by, he said, and higher wages will help. “If you give them money, it’s going to be spent,’’ he said. “And if money is spent, the economy gets better.’’

A majority of people in several states that ended up supporting Trump favored raising the minimum wage, according to a National Employment Law Project Action Fund poll done before the election. And yet there appears to be little political cost for legislators who oppose raising the wage, noted Michael Saltsman, research director at the conservative Employment Policies Institute in Washington. In a poll commissioned by the institute over the summer, 70 percent of voters in seven key battleground states said that a candidate’s opposition to raising the minimum wage would not have an impact on their vote, even if the voter personally supported raising the minimum wage.

Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @ktkjohnston.