Kamala Harris has been in the spotlight for quite some time, and with that comes scrutiny of every story she shares about her life. One recent claim she made—a nostalgic tale of her summer job at McDonald’s—has raised some eyebrows. Harris has been using this anecdote to connect with middle-class voters, portraying herself as someone who understands their struggles, having been a “middle-class kid” from San Francisco.
She was born in California in 1964. Her family left the state in 1966, and she did not return until she was of college age.
However, this story has hit a snag. Snopes, the well-known fact-checking site, hasn’t been able to confirm the details of her McDonald’s job. The issue isn’t just the lack of evidence; it’s also about whether the story aligns with Harris’s actual upbringing.
In her childhood, she spent another six years in Calfirnia between 1970 and 1976, before moving to Canada.
“Two middle-class kids. One, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother and had a summer job at McDonald’s,” she said in a tweet. “The other, a son of the Nebraska plains, who spent summers on the farm. Only in America is it possible that the two of us would be running together all the way to the White House.”
The narrative that Harris paints—that of a young girl growing up in the Bay Area—doesn’t fully match her real-life timeline. Her early years were quite dynamic, moving from one place to another as her parents pursued academic careers. After leaving California in 1966, her family lived in several Midwestern college towns, including Urbana, Illinois, and Madison, Wisconsin, before returning to Berkeley when Harris was around seven.
Even though she spent her later childhood in the Bay Area, her high school years took place in Montreal, Canada, where her mother had taken a research position. By the time she graduated from Westmount High School in 1981, Harris’s connection to California was already somewhat distant.
It’s important to note that while Harris did eventually return to California for college, the story of her childhood isn’t as straightforward as the “middle-class San Francisco kid” narrative suggests. The timeline, locations, and circumstances complicate the picture, making the McDonald’s job anecdote somewhat difficult to verify.
This isn’t the first time a politician’s personal story has come under scrutiny, and it likely won’t be the last. Whether this particular tale is accurate or not, it highlights the complexities of public life and the challenges that come with reconciling personal history with the demands of political storytelling.
