Opinion | Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and the Enduring Symbolism of McDonald’s

In presidential politics, you have to meet potential voters where they are. So every four years, churches, college campuses and even barbershops become the mainstays of the presidential campaign circuit. But, this year, the contenders have added the McDonald’s fry station. On Sunday, Donald Trump walked into a Bucks County, Pa., McDonald’s and told the store owner that he was looking for a job, explaining that “I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s.”

The public’s image of the typical McDonald’s employee has overlapped with the elusive voter both parties are hoping to secure in the last days of the race. The Trump and Harris campaigns have relied on the American dream of industry and unbridled capitalism to tell a story about social mobility and who can deliver it to more Americans. The story of who owns and who works at McDonald’s is part of that story.

Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned in campaign ads and interviews her experience working at McDonald’s as a student, the Trump campaign has accused the vice president of lying about her Big Mac bona fides. Even the Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s revelation that he was a McDonald’s Employee of the Month has not lessened the accusation that Democrats do not know or understand the Golden Arches like Mr. Trump does. Mr. Trump resurfaced his unfounded claims that Ms. Harris never worked at McDonald’s in Bucks County.

When Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff worked at McDonald’s in the early 1980s, the minimum wage never ticked higher than $3.35 per hour. This is the period that solidified the impression that the majority of its employees were like Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff, young people who temporarily worked to enhance allowances or put money toward tuition payments. The average age of a fast food worker in 2021 was 26 years old. In the ’80s, Mr. Trump — an aficionado and frequent customer of McDonald’s — was being interviewed by news programs about his ambitious pursuit of real estate in New York City. It’s a long way from real estate developer to making fries and working the drive-through.

When Ms. Harris talks about McDonald’s, working-class voters may see a future president who knows the fatigue of low-wage, service sector jobs. According to McDonald’s most recent diversity snapshot, 20 percent of its restaurant staff is Black and 35 percent of their co-workers are Hispanic, two groups that can deliver a victory for Ms. Harris. When Mr. Trump shares what is reportedly his favorite order of two Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, two Big Macs and a shake, his fans may applaud a rich guy who doesn’t turn his nose up at fast food. Much of Mr. Trump’s base may not relate to working at McDonald’s as much as dreaming of gaining Mr. Trump’s wealth and owning one.

In the early days of McDonald’s franchising in the 1950s, an array of public policies fueled a booming economy and made possible the franchising system that ushered middle-class people into business. These opportunities were often made available to white men, who had more access to capital to enter the franchise business than their Black counterparts. Additionally, McDonald’s head Ray Kroc focused his early leadership on suburbs, many of which were racially exclusionary and provided a captive consumer base for McDonald’s fare.

In the late 1960s, prompted by calls for racial justice after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, McDonald’s began to offer franchises to African American men, in collaboration with President Richard Nixon’s Black capitalism efforts. Mr. Nixon christened an Office of Minority Business Enterprise to connect private companies with public resources that could diversify business and establish small businesses in communities that provided few options for retail and commerce.

McDonald’s was an early participant in these programs. Over the course of a few years, Black diners in Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles and St. Louis feted the opening of the first Black McDonald’s franchises with great pride. Although these operators, as they are called, struggled to get strong finance terms, maintain their business operations in economically depressed areas and have their voices heard in the predominantly white McDonald’s organization, many of them persevered and expanded their holdings to other locations.

Mr. Nixon pointed to these businesses as signs of his commitment to economic justice and enlisted a new generation of Black business owners to articulate what he had made possible for them. In communities that had been calling for federal action on Black unemployment, police brutality and discrimination across all sectors, Mr. Nixon suggested those problems could be resolved with shiny new businesses, many of them fast-food restaurants. He reasoned that if he seeded economic initiatives in Black communities and grew Black prosperity that way, he would not have to confront the more vexing problems of residential and school segregation.

Mr. Nixon’s approach to generating pathways to Black wealth was a way to attract Black voters. The Republican Party used their pro-business appeals more broadly to co-opt Black Power supporters who saw Black-owned businesses as a goal for building Black political and economic strength.

By the early 1980s, when Ms. Harris was donning her McDonald’s uniform, the restaurant was a beacon of hope for minority entrepreneurship, but also a symbol of economic marginalization of workers of all colors. In the following decades, alarms would be sounded about the negative impact of fast food on health, especially on African Americans. Black franchisees would allege racial discrimination within the system and organizations would create campaigns to unionize fast food workers. Despite all of these critiques and conflicts, the government’s early relationship to McDonald’s growth in Black America and the larger sense that business would lead the way out of inequality has framed what Black voters are offered by both parties.

As the 2024 election nears, both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris have demonstrated that the McDonaldization of our politics continues. Last week, the Harris campaign unveiled a platform for Black men which placed a promise to create a million “forgivable loans up to $20,000 to Black entrepreneurs” at the top of the list, and included greater protection for “cryptocurrency and other digital assets.” The inclusion of these items will not make a sizable difference in steadying the economic precarity felt by millions of Black families who have been vulnerable to not only the historical legacies of racial discrimination, but also to the current challenges of rising housing costs and inflation.

The Democrats’ business-driven approach mirrors some of the ways that Mr. Trump’s 2020 Platinum Plan for Black voters, which promised “500,000 new Black-owned businesses,” and “access to capital in Black communities by almost $500 billion.” There is little evidence that the Republican Party took measures to make any of these promises real, even without Mr. Trump in the White House.

Although there are many things that Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris disagree on, like many Americans, their view of the role of McDonald’s in economic mobility is something they share. Both candidates appear to be running on the idea that Black voters are enamored with promises of the free market more so than guarantees for fair wages and labor protections, something fast food workers are all too often denied.

Marcia Chatelain is a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.”

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