The first all-female audience ever on The Drew Barrymore Show was whooping and cheering for Kamala Harris, its guest of honor, this April when Barrymore’s sidekick, Ross Matthews, threw a softball at the vice president.
"I heard a rumor that you worked at McDonald’s?"
"I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald’s," laughed Harris. "When I was at school … I did fries. And then I did the cashier."
"I didn’t know that about you," gasped Barrymore.
Neither did anyone who followed Harris’s long career in public life—that is, until she ran for president in 2019 and began to make the job a centerpiece of her biography.
Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she "was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s."
McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as "her humble background." (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls "a working mother," and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)
Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. "Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college," campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she "work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s." And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that "she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s."
At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers tweaked the story ever so slightly. According to an August 14 item in Politico, an early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to "pay her way" through college. Aides changed the script to reflect that "she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money," as Politico put it.
The Politico story, which was published just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’s claims regarding her job at McDonald’s, didn’t say when exactly—or where—Harris worked at the restaurant. The campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon’s inquiries.
It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative.
On Monday, the New York Times reported without attribution that Harris, who was born in Oakland, Calif., and moved to Montreal with her mother and younger sister when she was 12, "return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland." Harris was attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
If some details of the job have varied, while others are murky, that might be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.
The job goes unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019.
The Truths We Hold, published ahead of her maiden presidential bid, does include a passage on the "many jobs" she held in college, with no reference to McDonald’s. It also devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working class and assails the service industry’s "starvation wages." Harris’s McDonald’s job is similarly absent from her 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.
Two biographies written about Harris make no mention of the job, either. A 2021 memoir by Stacey Johnson-Batiste, Harris’s lifelong friend who grew up with her in California, does not mention McDonald’s anywhere in the text. Dan Morain, who authored Kamala’s Way: An American Life, told the Free Beacon he was "not aware" of her job at McDonald’s.
During Harris’s nomination speech at the Democratic National Committee earlier this month, which was framed by multiple news outlets as a "reintroduction," she made no reference to McDonald’s. At a rally in Milwaukee that same week, Harris omitted any mention of the Golden Arches as well.
The Free Beacon also obtained a copy of Harris’s October 1987 job application for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. On that form, Harris, who was in law school at the time, listed several jobs—including a month-long clerical job at a stock brokerage—in a section that asked her to list every position she held in the last 10 years. McDonald’s is absent.
Harris lists three jobs on the application and five in total on an attached résumé, according to the documents, obtained through a public records request. Harris, who submitted the application as a second-year student at then-University of California, Hastings College of the Law, included granular life experience on her résumé—"extensive travel in India, Africa, [and] Europe" and "lived in Montreal, Canada for six years"—but not McDonald’s.
Politicians who worked menial food service jobs as teens are often quick to mention it as proof of their working class bona fides. Future president Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, said his first job scooping ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu instilled in him the virtues of responsibility and hard work.
But unlike Harris, there was no mystery surrounding Obama’s first job. News outlets published the address of the restaurant. Photographers posted pictures of the establishment online. Baskin-Robbins proudly touts on its website that Obama used to scoop ice cream for the chain. The manager of the store quipped after the 2008 election that she was somewhat of a media professional after having dealt with reporters from Good Morning America, CNN, and a television station from Norway asking questions about Obama.
"Now I’m used to talking to reporters," the Baskin-Robbins manager, Sherill Fernandez, told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. "It’s always the same question. And the same answers."
The same can’t be said for Harris. Though the Times reported she worked at a franchise in Alameda, her campaign has not provided any more details to other news organizations. The previous owner of an Alameda McDonald’s that opened in 1982—one year before Harris would have worked there—did not respond to a request for comment.
The McDonald’s Corporation, which is proud of its 84-year history and employs a full-time archivist as its official historian, did not return several requests for comment. It has made no comment on Harris’s claims to have done the fries.