Lyndon Johnson herded goats, Richard Nixon plucked chickens, and Bill Clinton stocked supermarkets.
Many presidents have held down menial jobs early in their working lives. If Kamala Harris is elected in November, she would add one of her own to that list: waitress at McDonald's.
The vice president has said for the past few years that she worked at McDonald's as a student, “making fries and ice cream.” The fact that she and her campaign have mentioned this appears to be an acknowledgement of a powerful voting bloc whose support she is trying to win over.
At some point, as McDonald's franchises popped up across the country and the brand became dominant, it became impossible to ignore the menial, dead-end aspects of working for the chain. By the 1980s, the term “McJob” entered the lexicon of popular culture as a pejorative term. Merriam-Webster still defines it as a “low-paying job that requires little skill and offers few opportunities for advancement.”
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at Northwestern High School in Detroit on Sept. 2.
(Paul Sancya/Associated Press)
For Harris and those close to her, though, it’s been something to brag about. Unlike previous presidents, some of whom rarely, if ever, spoke of their modest professional beginnings, Harris’s campaign has been flaunting her time at the Golden Arches. In August, it released an ad that said the vice president “worked at McDonald’s while getting her degree” — a reference to her time at Howard University in the 1980s — and added, “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 the fast food world. Bill Clinton, famously fond 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 mentioned the burger giant while attacking former President Trump: “One of the candidates worked at McDonald’s while in college at an HBCU. The other was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”
At a time when Democratic candidates have consistently lagged behind Republicans in seeking support from working-class voters, the Harris campaign’s decision to tie the candidate to a brand beloved by large swaths of the population is smart and could make her more relatable, several observers told The Times.
“It’s a smart way to appeal to the working class. [voters] “… who have probably worked in places worse than McDonald’s,” said David Garrow, author of “Rising Star,” a biography of Barack Obama. “There’s certainly a class appeal aspect to this.”
It's also a gesture that may be designed to deflect attention from Harris's status as a California liberal, said Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa.
Harris is trying to “appeal to voters across the country,” Contois said, adding that McDonald’s has a “nationalist tone” that can also help. “Almost every American has eaten there.”
But the issue has not been without its dangers.
On August 29, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, published an article casting doubt on whether Harris ever worked at McDonald's, saying the job was not listed on a resume she submitted a year after college and noting that biographers had not mentioned the job either. The Trump campaign seized on the story, demanding that Harris prove she worked for the chain.
Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Douglas Emhoff order food at El Cholo in Santa Monica last year.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Trump said the vice president lied about working 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 it. … She never worked at McDonald’s. She said she stood next to those fries while they were frying them and it was very rough.” [work]“She is a liar.”
In a statement to The Times, Harris campaign spokesman Rhyan Lake touted the vice president’s “middle-class roots,” saying they are “a big reason she is fighting to lower the cost of living and ensure that every American has the opportunity to not just survive, but get ahead.”
“It's not surprising that Trump doesn't understand this considering he wants to increase costs for the middle class to give more tax breaks 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 downplay the story. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois noted that he had “worked at Hardee’s and literally never told anyone until now. It’s not on my list either. I still work there.”
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Her experience at McDonald's stands in stark contrast to Harris' reputation as a gourmet. She is an accomplished diner at restaurants in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and a skilled home cook, a hobby she has turned into part of her political persona.
“One of the things I do that I find most enjoyable, and that gives me stability, is cooking 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 overall strategy designed to help the candidate connect with voters. Harris's experience at McDonald's, he said, “will reach a different audience than those who pay attention to the fact that she…makes amazing roast chicken.”
Harris's experience at McDonald's gives her something in common with a sizable portion of the electorate: The fast-food company has said that one in eight Americans has worked at the chain. What's more, during his convention speech, second gentleman Doug Emhoff mentioned that he had worked there, too, laughingly explaining that he had once been employee of the month at the branch.
As with Crockett's scathing comments, other Democrats have pointed to Harris's time serving French fries (her campaign has said she worked at a McDonald's in Alameda, California, in the summer of 1983) as a way to contrast her life experience with Trump's.
“Can you imagine Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s trying to make a McFlurry or something?” Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz asked an audience in August. “He couldn’t operate that damn McFlurry machine.”
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Some 21st-century presidents have held jobs in the restaurant industry, including Barack Obama. As a teenager, he served ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu. In recent years, Obama has spoken about his work, including in a 2020 speech attacking Trump.
In the final year of his presidency, Obama wrote on LinkedIn that his work in the ice cream industry had taught him the value of “responsibility, hard work, balancing work, friends, family and school.” However, Obama did not include his experience at Baskin-Robbins in his campaign message.
Garrow said that may have been strategic. “He wanted to present himself as one of the ‘best and brightest,’ not as a common plebeian who had worked ordinary jobs,” Garrow said of Obama’s first run for president.
Jerry Newman, on the other hand, believes that a job at a fast-food restaurant is something a candidate can boast about. The author of 2006’s “My Secret Life on the McJob,” which chronicles his undercover work at a fast-food restaurant, said such employees learn about the importance of reliability, working under pressure and teamwork — key tenets of any blue-collar job.
Harris, he said, “can point out that if she hadn’t already learned those things, she certainly reinforced them” during her time at the network.
If working at McDonald's or Baskin-Robbins is now something to celebrate, it's a shift that may reflect evolving views about the value of manual labor at a time when large numbers of Americans identify with the designation “working class.”
According to an August survey by the Pew Research Center, 54% of Americans said the word “working class” described them “extremely or very well.” It also found that 62% of Republicans described themselves that way, while 48% of Democrats did.
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On a recent weekday afternoon, it was 96 degrees and the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Vine Street in Hollywood shimmered in the heat. The restaurant’s patio offered some shade for Ashley Zamarripa, 21, who said she didn’t know Harris had ever worked at McDonald’s and felt it made the vice president “more relatable.”
“When I hear about Harris, who had a job that any average person has (I work in retail), I can relate to that,” she said.
Not everyone saw Harris’s story as a plus. One man with a scruffy beard and sweatpants, who declined to give his name, said he didn’t think the candidate’s time in the fast-food industry was “deserving.” After all, he noted, many people have to take hard jobs to survive.
But Rod Hubbard, who works in private security, said: “If someone in his position had been in my situation, it would have been familiar to me.”
Smiling wryly, Hubbard explained that he had a good idea of what Harris might have endured at McDonald's because she once worked at Burger King. “That means she understands hard work,” he said. “She's been there, like a lot of us.”
Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts and researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
