Lyndon Johnson herded goats. Richard Nixon plucked chickens. And Bill Clinton stocked groceries.
Many presidents have had humble jobs early in their working lives. If Kamala Harris is elected in November, she’d join that list with one of her own: McDonald’s server.
The vice president has said over the last several years that she worked at McDonald’s while she was a student, “doing french fries and ice cream.” That she and her campaign have mentioned it at all appears to be an acknowledgment of a powerful block of voters whose support she’s trying to earn.
Somewhere along the line, as McDonald’s franchises popped up across the nation and the brand grew dominant, it became impossible to ignore the menial, dead-end aspects of working for the chain. In the 1980s, the term “McJob” entered the pop culture lexicon as a pejorative. Merriam-Webster still defines it as a “low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.”
For Harris and her surrogates, though, it’s been something to brag about. Unlike past presidents, some of whom rarely, if ever, spoke about their modest professional beginnings, Harris’ campaign has been trumpeting her time at the Golden Arches. In August, it released an ad that said the vice president “worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree,” a reference to her time at Howard University in the 1980s, adding, “Kamala Harris knows what it’s like to be middle class.”
At the Democratic National Convention, several speeches drew attention to the vice president’s background in fast food. Bill Clinton, famed for his love of McDonald’s, joked that, if elected, Harris would break his record “as the president who has spent the most time” there. And Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett brought up the burger behemoth while attacking former President Trump: “One candidate worked at McDonald’s while she was in college at an HBCU. The other was born with the silver spoon in his mouth.”
Amid an era in which the Democratic Party has seen its candidates routinely trail Republicans in capturing the support of working-class voters, the decision by the Harris campaign to tie the candidate to a brand beloved by large swaths of the population is a smart one that could make her more relatable, several observers told The Times.
“It is a savvy way of appealing to working-class [voters] … who have probably worked at places worse than McDonald’s,” said David Garrow, author of “Rising Star,” a biography of Barack Obama. “There is, undoubtedly, a class-appeal aspect to it.”
It also is a gesture that may be designed to draw attention away from Harris’ status as a liberal from California, said Emily Contois, associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa.
Harris is trying “to appeal to voters from all across the country,” said Contois, adding that there’s a “nationalist undertone” to McDonald’s that may help, too. “Pretty much every American has eaten there.”
But the topic has not been without peril.
On Aug. 29, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, published a report that questioned whether Harris had worked at McDonald’s, saying that the job was not listed on a resume she submitted a year after college and noting that biographers had not mentioned the work either. Trump’s campaign seized on the story, demanding that Harris prove she worked for the chain.
Trump said the vice president lied about having worked at McDonald’s during a campaign event last week and repeated the claim the next day during a news conference at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes.
“She never worked at McDonald’s,” he said. “It’s a lie. They went in, they investigated it, and the fake news won’t report that. … She never worked at McDonald’s. She said she stood over those French fries when they were being fried, and it was such tough [work]. She’s a liar.”
In a statement to The Times, Harris campaign spokesperson Rhyan Lake touted the vice president’s “middle-class roots,” saying they are “a big reason why she is fighting to lower the cost of living and ensure every American has the opportunity not to just get by, but to get ahead.”
“It’s not surprising Trump doesn’t understand that considering he wants to explode costs on the middle class to give more tax handouts to billionaires,” Lake said.
McDonald’s did not respond to requests for comment.
After the Free Beacon report was published, a former Republican congressman took to X to make light of the story. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois noted that he had “worked at Hardee’s and literally never told anyone until just now. It’s not in my book either. Still worked there.”
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A tenure at McDonald’s makes for a notable juxtaposition with Harris’ reputation as a gourmand. She is a knowledgeable diner at restaurants in L.A. and beyond, and a skilled home cook — a pastime she’s made part of her political persona.
“One of the things that I do that I find most enjoyable — and it just grounds me — is to cook Sunday family dinner,” she said in an Instagram video posted in July.
Contois sees the mentions of McDonald’s and Sunday dinners as different parts of the same overarching strategy designed to help the candidate connect with voters. Harris’ McDonald’s experience, she said, is “going to reach a different audience than those who are paying attention to the fact that she … makes a killer roast chicken.”
Harris’ McDonald’s stint gives her something in common with a sizable part of the electorate: the fast-food company has said that one in eight Americans have worked at the chain. What’s more, during his convention speech, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff mentioned that he’d worked there as well, explaining to laughs that he’d once been employee of the month at his branch.
As with Crockett’s pointed comments, other Democrats have held up Harris’ time slinging fries — her campaign has said she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, Calif., in the summer of 1983 — as a way to contrast her life experience with that of Trump.
“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s trying to make a McFlurry or something?” Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz asked an audience in August. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine.”
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A few 21st century presidents have had jobs in food service, among them Barack Obama. As a teenager, he scooped ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu. In recent years, Obama has spoken about the job — including in a 2020 speech that attacked Trump.
In the final year of his presidency, Obama wrote on LinkedIn that the ice cream gig had taught him the value of “Responsibility. Hard work. Balancing a job with friends, family, and school.” However, Obama did not make his Baskin-Robbins experience part of his campaign messaging.
That might have been strategic, Garrow said. “He wanted to present himself as among ‘the best and the brightest,’ not some common plebe who’d held workaday jobs,” Garrow said of Obama’s first run for the presidency.
Jerry Newman, on the other hand, believes a fast-food job is something a candidate can tout. The author of 2006’s “My Secret Life on the McJob,” which chronicled his undercover work in fast food, said that those employees learn about the importance of reliability, working under pressure and being a team player — bedrock principles of any blue-collar job.
Harris, he said, “can make the point that if she hadn’t already learned those things they were certainly reinforced” during her stint with the chain.
If working at McDonald’s or Baskin-Robbins is now something to celebrate, that’s a shift that may reflect changing views about the value of blue-collar work at a time when a large number of Americans identify with the “working class” designation.
According to an August poll by the Pew Research Center, 54% percent of Americans said that “working class” described them “extremely or very well.” It also found that 62% of Republicans described themselves this way, while 48% of Democrats did.
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It was 96 degrees on a recent weekday afternoon, and the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Vine Street in Hollywood shimmered with heat. The restaurant’s patio offered a sliver of shade for Ashley Zamarripa, 21, who said that she hadn’t known that Harris once worked at McDonald’s, and felt it made the vice president “more relatable.”
“Hearing about Harris, who worked a job that a common person works — I work in retail — I can relate to that,” she said.
Not everyone saw Harris’ backstory as much of a plus. A man with a scruffy beard and cutoff sweatpants who declined to give his name, said that he didn’t think the candidate’s time in fast food was of “merit.” After all, he noted, plenty of people have to take on arduous work to survive.
But Rod Hubbard, who works in private security, said, “For somebody in her position to have been in my same shoes, that would resonate with me.”
Smiling wryly, Hubbard explained that he had a good sense of what Harris might have endured at McDonald’s because he once worked at Burger King. “It means that she understands hard work,” he said. “She’s been there, like a lot of us have.”
Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts and researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.