Did Kamala Harris even work at McDonald’s? It’s become a central narrative for her 2024 campaign. On its face, it’s nothing we haven’t heard, but it’s a story that resonates: the vice president worked at McDonald’s to pay her way through college. She was the fry lady and later a cashier. It’s about work, being working class, and threading that all into an American dream narrative. Yet, like everything about the Harris candidacy, it must be double-checked because a) the liberal media won’t do it, and b) the Democratic Party is addicted to lying. The Washington Free Beacon thoroughly combed this part of Harris’ life. To the shock of no one, there are questions:
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.
The Harris campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon’s questions. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz lied about his rank and being deployed to a combat zone. Harris might have stretched the truth about working at the fast food giant. Is there anything that’s remotely authentic about the 2024 Democratic ticket?
Kamala Harris did not list McDonald’s on her post-college résumé and job applications.
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) August 29, 2024
This follows the @FreeBeacon’s bombshell exposé that Tim Walz claimed during his 2006 gubernatorial campaign to have received an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce when it was… https://t.co/CjKGIppW5n