Kamala Harris and Tim Walz visited Cocina Adamex in Phoenix last week. Melina Mara/The Washington Post

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is emphasizing her middle-class bona fides, and one of the lines she’s coming to rely on in public appearances to make that case is a lesser-known entry on her résumé: former McDonald’s worker.

In an ad that debuted Friday, the Harris campaign highlighted her stint at the Golden Arches. As the camera pans across a set of vintage family photos, the narrator intones: “She grew up in a middle-class home. She was the daughter of a working mom. And she worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree.”

Harris also mentioned the job at Saturday’s rally in Las Vegas, where she told an enthusiastic crowd that “only in America” could two middle-class kids – referring to herself and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz – grow up to be on a ballot for the nation’s highest offices. “I had a summer job at McDonald’s,” she said, by way of underscoring her humble background.

Harris has mentioned her time at McDonald’s before. But her experience as a visor-sporting fast-food worker certainly isn’t as widely known as many of her other biographical signposts, such as California attorney general, senator, vice president – or even avid cook and Converse sneakerhead. And so to many people just getting to know Harris after President Joe Biden dramatically dropped out of the race three weeks ago, this is brand-new information.

Name-checking the fast-food giant is – like everything in high-level politics – a deliberate move, calibrated to achieve an effect. In this case, the mention is in part about relatability. And that’s because of this staggering fact: One in 8 Americans have worked at McDonald’s at some point in their lives, according to the fast-food chain. McDonald’s announced that statistic last year when it introduced the 1 in 8 initiative, a campaign to celebrate its vast army of current and former workers. The company said it surveyed a representative sample of American adults and found that 13.7 percent of people said they had worked or currently work for the chain.

Martha McKenna, a media strategist who makes TV ads for Democratic candidates, says that drawing out this part of Harris’s résumé isn’t just a matter of seeming folksy. The service sector is the largest part of the American economy, she notes. “Millions of people work in food service, and for her to say ‘I have had this experience, and it has shaped my policies’ is powerful,” she says.

And it draws further contrast, she says, with her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump. “It’s a great part of her life and experience to highlight against a guy who inherited his wealth, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” McKenna says.

Walz pushed that distinction during a Tuesday speech to a union crowd, questioning Trump’s work ethic in contrast with Harris’s fast-food hustle. “Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to make a McFlurry or something?” Walz asked. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”

Other famous people have worn the McDonald’s uniform, including Jeff Bezos, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pharrell Williams, Shania Twain and former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Harris has previously offered some details about her tenure at the Golden Arches, including during an April appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show.” She described her duties as fry-making and operating the register. (On Facebook, she also described working the chain’s notoriously finicky ice cream machines.) And, when pressed, she revealed what she would order at her previous employer: a Quarter Pounder with cheese and fries.

We don’t know precisely when Harris worked at McDonald’s. The ad said it was “while she earned her degree” but didn’t specify whether it was during her undergraduate or law school years.

She also invoked her summer job in 2019 when she joined Las Vegas McDonald’s workers who were protesting and striking for higher wages. “I was a student when I was working at McDonald’s,” she told the crowd, in a video posted on her Facebook page. “There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month. But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folks who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”

Harris expressed solidarity with employees in Detroit that same year when they were campaigning for a $15 wage and said she supported the McDonald’s workers who claimed they endured rampant sexual harassment at a location in Mason, Mich. (The franchise’s former owner eventually settled the class action case for $1.5 million; the McDonald’s corporation successfully argued that it did not employ the women who were harassed.)

“So many people in the United States begin their working career with jobs like that,” says Georgetown history professor Joseph McCartin, who is also the executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. “Many people, of course, stay in those jobs for a long time and raise families, or try to, and for anybody who has worked in the industry, I think immediately that tells them something about Kamala Harris and what she’s come through on her way up.”

Both campaigns, McCartin said, are taking particular pains to appeal to working-class voters this cycle, including Trump’s pick of JD Vance – who has made his own working-class upbringing a prominent part of his identity – as his running mate. He credits the focus in part to a surge in dissatisfaction from workers who feel they haven’t been treated fairly. “You’ve got an incipient class discontent that gets expressed in lots of different ways – it can be expressed in unionizing efforts like the ones you’re seeing at Starbucks, or it can also be expressed in a kind of right-wing populist mode as well,” McCartin says. “Class issues are mattering quite significantly in this campaign.”

Of course, Trump is no stranger to McDonald’s, although his experience is on the other side of the register. Trump is an avid fan of the chain, and according to son-in-law Jared Kushner, his go-to order is a Big Mac, a Filet-O-Fish and a vanilla shake. Campaign-finance disclosures have shown Trump’s presidential campaign is spending heavily at the chain. He had delivery orders brought in during both his fraud trial in October and his hush-money trial in April. And he famously served Big Macs several times to athletes visiting the White House.

Trump has said he likes McDonald’s cleanliness, and author Michael Wolff claims in his book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” that the preference is partly fueled by Trump’s fear of being poisoned. When Trump ordered from the fast-food chain, “nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade,” Wolff wrote.

Harris isn’t known to be as big an aficionado of fast food, and although we know she’s an adventurous home cook with a sophisticated palate, she’s not above food that some might consider lowbrow. In a video in which she schools her then-colleague Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., on how to make tuna sandwiches, she professes love for Miracle Whip and declares fried bologna to be “delicious.”

She is an avowed fan of the ketchup packets that come with McDonald’s fries. “That ketchup is especially thick and it’s got a little sweetness in it,” she said during her appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show.” And then there’s her hack for eating on the fly. The vice president told Barrymore how she protected her clothing from spills and crumbs while campaigning. “We would just cut open a garbage bag,” she said. “It’s a really great, massive bib.”

Like so many things in politics, highlighting her experience as a fast-food worker could be a double-edged sword for Harris. Turns out, it might have created some high expectations. “Alright Kamala,” one prospective supporter posted on X, “guarantee the ice cream machine always works at @McDonalds going forward and you ‘might’ get my vote.”