What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Did Kamala Harris Really Work at McDonald's?

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has long stated she worked at McDonald’s when she was in college. While this is not the centerpiece of her elect-me sales pitch, she has repeated variations of “I used to work in fast food” enough times that it’s become part of her public-facing biography. Harris has made the claim about McDonald’s at her acceptance speech at the DNC, on her own twitter feed, on a guest appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April (where she also said she likes barbecue sauce on her chicken nuggets.) and other places.

Since the DNC, a low rumble has been building about the veracity of Harris’s McDonald’s claim, with some accusing her of having invented the part-time job. It started with the revelation that Harris didn’t include her supposed stint at McDonald’s on a post-college job application and culminated in Donald Trump repeatedly calling Harris a liar because had never worked at McDonald’s.

Bottom line: Did Kamala Harris work at McDonald’s? 

The verdict: Unconfirmed. 

We just don’t know. People who say Harris is lying about her career in fast food are wrong, and people who say she definitely did work at McDonald’s are wrong too. At least for now—because we have no solid evidence one way or the other, it’s an open question. (People who say, “I guess we’ll see,” or “who even cares?” are right.)

The evidence that Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s

The only evidence we have the Kamala Harris ever worked at McDonald’s is that she and her campaign say she did. Harris first claimed that she worked at McDonald’s at a speech at a Las Vegas labor rally in 2019. Her campaign confirmed that she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, CA, during the summer while attending college, in the mid 1980s.

The evidence that Kamala Harris didn’t work at McDonald’s

The only evidence we have that Harris did not work at a McDonald’s is that people say she can’t prove she did. They can’t really make a case, because it’s impossible to prove a negative, but here are their claims: Harris didn’t mention McDonald’s in her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold, nor did she include it on a 1987 application to work as a clerk in the Alameda County district attorney’s office or any other résumé. No one has come forward to say “I worked with her at McDonald’s,” either.

The problem with proving you worked at McDonalds

A job at McDonald’s is traditionally easy to get and easy to leave. It’s the kind of no-skills position young people stay at for a couple of months or a couple of shifts, and then move on to other things. It's just not the kind of position that leaves behind a lot of evidence. 

McDonald’s says one in eight Americans have worked at the fast food place at least once, but the fast food chain operates on a franchise model, so there’s no central database of employees that you can check. It seems highly unlikely that the owner of a McDonald’s franchise in Alameda would keep employment records for part-time employees from the mid 1980s. That was a long time ago, and California law requires companies hold onto employment records for four years, not 40. 

Trump's claim about Harris' employment is a lie, though. At a Moms for Liberty convention recently, he said, “After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there." That isn't true; no one found anything out.

The rest of the “Harris lied” claims are equally flimsy. It’s true that she didn’t include McDonald’s on her application for a clerkship at the Alameda district attorney’s office, but that was probably to make room for her work for the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Senate, and two California legal firms. That no one has come forward with a picture of her in a polyester uniform or said, “I remember working the fry machine with her” could be because she wasn’t at McDonald’s very long, or she wasn’t a very memorable co-worker, or really any other reason. It’s just impossible to say. 

Why does it even matter if Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s?

When I was in college, I worked at a sandwich shop, a WaWa, a telemarketing firm, a “record your own song” booth on the Atlantic City boardwalk, Domino’s pizza, and probably some other places I've since forgotten. If my life depended on it, I could not prove that I worked in any of those places. I don’t think I included them on any résumés I ever sent, either.

If I were crafting a folksy, public-facing biography, I might include a detail or two about the hardships of delivering pizzas, or tell the story of quitting a boiler-room telemarketing job, and my then-boss saying, “You’ll never amount to anything” (He was totally right, btw), even if I couldn’t prove any of it had happened. “Who would lie about this, anyway?” I might ask.

I imagine Harris publicly speaks about an old job she may or may not have held because “I worked at McDonald’s” is an easy way to reinforce the “we’re just normal people like you” vibe of the Harris/Walz campaign. It’s politics, and the Harris campaign has apparently determined that some segment of the voting population would be more likely to vote for someone if they've previously cooked French fries. Just as her opposition has apparently decided that "she didn't put McDonald's on her resume!" would make people less likely to vote for her.

I’m aware that the reason I’m inclined to believe Harris (or to think “who even cares?”) is probably because I like her. If I didn’t, maybe I’d think this was another example of Kamala’s Harris’s boundless mendacity. Because ultimately, whether you believe that Harris is lying is more about who you are and what you believe than whether a 19-year-old college kid had a summer job at Mickey D.’s.