Votes with that? How the politics of McDonald’s went global

LONDON — Fifty years ago this month, the first McDonald’s opened in the U.K, becoming the 3,000th franchise of the fast food giant worldwide.
Staff at the restaurant in the working class suburb of Woolwich, south east London, were paid 65 pence an hour and got free food. A milkshake, burger and “French fries” (so much more exotic than British “chips”) cost diners 48p. Life would never be the same.
Attending the grand opening was the the gloriously named Mayor Len Squirrel, the first British politician to embrace the Big Mac, but by no means the last.
Here in the U.K., and across the more than 100 countries which host the Golden Arches, when it comes to McDonald’s, it seems politicians are lovin’ it.
On Sunday, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump hit up a branch of Maccy Ds in the swing state of Pennsylvania to man a fries station.
A Mc-enthusiast, whose order of choice is said to be two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate milkshake, Trump famously once catered a White House celebration for college football players with McDonald’s. But the former president didn’t go to the Feasterville-Travose branch of the chain merely to hang with Ronald McDonald.
The visit paid a dual purpose: proving Trump’s affinity with voters by spending time in America’s favorite restaurant, and throwing shade over rival Kamala Harris’ own claim to the McVote.
In a version of “birtherism,” the lie peddled by Trump that Barack Obama was born overseas, the Republican is deploying what the New York Times dubbed “burgerism,” suggesting Harris is fibbing about her time toiling for a McDonald’s paycheck as a college student.  
Asked why Trump had wanted to shovel fries, his aide Jason Miller said: “So that one candidate in this race could have actually worked at McDonald’s.”
The Harris campaign hit back, insisting she was employed in an Alameda, California, branch of McDonald’s in 1983, working the cash register, French fry station and ice cream machine.
What might be viewed as a minor detail on a C.V. is clearly seen in political circles as something akin to electoral gold dust.
Since her nomination, allies have made play of Harris’ time doling out burgers. Former President Bill Clinton, who himself once campaigned in a McDonald’s, told the Democratic National Convention she would “break my record as the president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.”
“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s?” asked Tim Walz, Harris’ pick to be vice president. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”
But why do politicos seek to play up their McDonald’s connections? And why McDonald’s, why not Pizza Hut or Burger King — or just that café on the high street where they waited tables one summer?
Natalie Kirby was head of media at McDonald’s U.K. for six years until 2014, and before that worked for the Conservative Party as an aide to William Hague when he was leader of the party.
She said: “It’s seen as a shorthand for: I’m a man or woman of the people. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, quite the opposite: it’s saying I’m prepared to do hard graft. I earned my stripes. I’m like everyone else on the streets.”
Confirming Harris’ claim to have worked in McDonald’s, this week her high school friend Wanda Kagan told the New York Times she too had worked in the fast food joint: “That’s what us regular folks did.”
Because working in McDonald’s is indeed what regular American folk did — and do. One in eight U.S. citizens has at some point worked beneath the Golden Arches, flipping burgers, salting fries and assembling Happy Meal containers. One in 13 Americans will eat in a McDonald’s today.
Does that mean they’ll feel warm towards a politician who has also worked in or eaten a McDonald’s? Both Harris and Trump seem to think so.
Back in Britain, Kemi Badenoch, favorite in the contest to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, has also been talking up her time as a Mc-employee, flipping burgers in a south London restaurant while at high school.
“I grew up in a middle class family, but I became working class when I was 16 working at McDonald’s,” she told GB News. “Just understanding how many people there were single parents, and they were working there to make ends meet.
“There’s a humility there … You had to wash toilets, you had to flip burgers, you had to handle money.”
One aide to Badenoch said that while U.S. politicians seek to prove their “quintessential Americanness” when they talk about McDonald’s, the would-be Tory leader was making a slightly different point.
Badenoch grew up in a prosperous family in Nigeria, which fell on hard times due to the changing political situation there, and came to the U.K. with just £100 in its pocket.
“What she particularly talks about is the fact that she had to clean the toilets,” the aide said. “It was a very formative moment for her. She wanted to make the best of herself, so she didn’t have to clean toilets again.
“Trump handing out burgers and fries is something a little different — he’s connecting with voters by highlighting a quintessential piece of Americana. When Kemi references it, she’s talking about having to clean the bathrooms. All she ate was burgers, because that’s how she had to feed herself.”
Badenoch, the aide suggested, saw McDonald’s as a stepping stone to a better life — a route Kirby said was often the case for employees. “These aren’t dead end jobs. A surprising number of people on the McDonald’s board started in Saturday jobs when they were 16, 18. Others start there then go on to big careers elsewhere.”
If Badenoch wins, she’ll be facing Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer across the House of Commons. Bucking the political trend to embrace the burger, as a young lawyer in the 1990s, pescatarian Starmer worked pro bono to represent a group of environmentalists McDonald’s sued in the long-running courtroom drama which became known as the “McLibel” case.
Taunted during the election campaign for his somewhat robotic style and struggles to connect with voters, he might have been wise to have eschewed the law and flipped burgers instead.
In Europe too, McDonald’s seems to be having a moment in political circles. Belgium MEP Assita Kanko tweeted a photo of herself Monday clutching a McDonald’s bag, saying: “I am just hungry. Not campagning [sic] or something.”
The corporate McDonald’s line is that the burger joint is non-political. “We are not red or blue — we are golden,” was the official statement from McDonald’s Chicago HQ in response to Trump’s day behind the fryer.
Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean McDonald’s isn’t deeply political.
In 1996, the writer Thomas L. Friedman posited what became known as the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict  Prevention,” summed up as: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.”
Friedman suggested that where globalization had driven economic development in a country to a place where it could sustain a McDonald’s, then the new middle class there would have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding conflict.
Sadly, the theory didn’t survive Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
A decade before the Golden Arches theory, the Economist magazine came up with the Big Mac Index, by which the value of a currency is assessed relative to the cost of a Big Mac in a local McDonald’s; “Using patty-power parity to think about exchange rates,” as the strapline reads.
Kirby said that in some senses, McDonald’s is a symbol of capitalism itself, spreading the American dream on the global stage. “McDonald’s is so ubiquitous, it’s global — it makes sense for it to be a benchmark.
“Part of it is the franchisee model — it’s owner operated, and that makes it very attractive, because you can own your own business. Nothing can touch it in terms of global reach.”
And it’s not just on the macro level that the French fry is political — at the micro level too, McDonald’s bobs on the rocky seas of social movement.
In recent years, the company has been hit with its very own #MeToo movements. Last year Alistair Macrow, chief executive of McDonald’s U.K. and Ireland, told a parliamentary committee the firm had received 407 complaints “of all types,” of which 157 had been fully investigated with 17 categorized as sexual harassment. He said: “The cases are absolutely horrendous. What I’d like to be clear about is that we will tackle them and make sure that we do everything we can to eradicate them from the business. Nothing is more important.”
There have been protests against the chain’s environmental impact, concerns raised about obesity and ill health, and strikes over low wages.
But the chain has done much good as well, raising billions for charities and paying millions for employees to go through college.
One summer years ago, I worked in the Clapham High Street branch of McDonald’s, like Badenoch in south London, and like Harris to earn some cash during the long university vacation.
After a few weeks I realized a weird form of apartheid had emerged, with the young, white, female members of the crew pushed onto the cash registers, while older, male and minority members of staff languished behind the scenes.
There was compassion, though; elderly people knew they could come in and get a free hot drink, and stay as long as they liked. It’s a scheme many franchises around the world continue today, with little fanfare.
Many years later, I lived around the corner from a Ronald McDonald House in New York City, the gleaming glass and concrete structure a comfort to hundreds of families dealing with a little one’s cancer diagnosis. There are now Ronald McDonald Houses in 64 countries.
Yet the fast food chain’s origin story, as told in the 2016 movie “The Founder” starring Michael Keaton (and disputed by McDonald’s) is decidedly Trumpian.
While the first restaurant was opened by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California, in 1940, their production line, self service system was turned into a mass franchise model by the Chicago entrepreneur Ray Kroc, who bought the brothers out in the 1961 and turned McDonald’s into the national and then international beast we now know and love — or loathe.
Today, there are 36,000 McDonald’s restaurants, with more than 2 million employees. Revenue comes in at about $26 billion a year. And despite a few wobbles along the way, the company is growing.
Kroc once said: “It is ridiculous to call this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em, and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way — of survival of the fittest.”
Sounds a lot like politics.