About a week before Vice President Kamala Harris visited Dottie’s Market in Savannah, Georgia, co-owner Ericka Phillips suspected something might be in the works. “Savannah’s a small town,” she said. “Secret Service people stick out.”
What Phillips did not expect was to go viral. In a campaign-produced TikTok video that has since been viewed more than 18 million times, Harris walks into the restaurant, stops in her tracks and says, “What is that cake?” Her voice is filled with enthusiasm, almost longing. The video cuts to a chocolate cake with caramel frosting. They don’t usually make cakes, but pastry chef Jae Newby had whipped it up to commemorate Dottie’s (Phillips’s great-grandmother) birthday.
It’s likely Harris didn’t know the cake was made in Dottie’s honor, but the tribute to the restaurant’s namesake, who died in 2013, only helped fuel its popularity. Since the video went public, the cake has sold out every day. Requests to ship the cake come in daily. There’s merch. Patrons reserve a whole cake for dinner. Soon, Dottie’s will release a version of the chocolate-caramel cake in a jar, which can travel anywhere.
In this fiercely contested swing state, the cake has become a sweet touchstone for Harris supporters. “A woman drove three hours on her birthday, that’s what she wanted to do, to come to Dottie’s where the VP had been and have the cake,” Phillips said “Three women who live locally came in that day for the same reason, and they all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her.”
The appeal of the cake—beyond that it looked delicious—was that the vice president really, really wanted to try it. Her enthusiasm created a feeling of connection familiar to food TV fans, but much less common in the world of politics.
In the final weeks of this knife’s edge presidential campaign, the sprint to the finish line has come down to swaying the small slice of undecided or infrequent voters who could tip the balance. Bakery stops have been few and far between, but that relatable passion helped introduce Harris to the American public at lightning speed. In Georgia, where the airwaves are currently blanketed in attack ads, the cake video gives voters an alternative.
For politicians, eating is always a part of the likability test, but Harris is the first presidential candidate to use it as a strength. Running for the American presidency has long involved eating mountains of American foods on the campaign trail.
But competently consuming a pork chop on a stick and chipping in on a fish fry doesn’t generate headlines. Some of the most famous campaign eating moments occurred when something went wrong. Like when Gerald Ford ate a tamale, husk and all, which some claim cost him the election. Or John Kerry’s fatal request, on his Philly cheesesteak, for Swiss. (He won Pennsylvania anyway, but no one remembers that part.)
For female presidential candidates, food was believed to be a downright liability. In 1964, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine became the first woman to seek the nomination of a major political party. The Republican was well-known for sharing recipes using ingredients from her state, but at least one campaign stop, she refuted her characterization as the “blueberry muffin” candidate, saying reporters should focus on her loyal service in Congress. During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the most indelible food image was of the candidate looking longingly at a piece of cheesecake she didn’t dare eat.
In contrast, as part of Harris’s first presidential campaign in 2019, cooking was a showcase. The “Cooking with Kamala” videos started airing that year. The first videos are built around her Iowa campaign. One is set in the home of her campaign’s Iowa chair, where she and Harris make a recipe using Iowa apples and bacon. In another, Harris joins forces with comedian Mindy Kaling to cook masala dosas and discuss their respective South Indian backgrounds.
“Harris very effectively used food and cooking to highlight her unique identity,” says Trevor Parry-Giles, a professor in communication at the University of Maryland who examined these videos after the 2020 election “The videos are designed to head off any confusion or perhaps misunderstanding about her ethnic identity,” he said.
Cooking on camera to deliver a political message was prescient. Another set of “Cooking with Kamala” videos were produced for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020, when during lockdown Harris joined chefs and political figures to cook on Instagram Live. To many Americans stuck at home with nothing to do but cook, it was maximally relatable.
When Harris became the 2024 Democratic nominee, her previous campaign’s cooking videos resurfaced on social media. Fun, short clips became popular, and stood in for the kinds of content a longer campaign may have produced.
“[Those videos] are not going to change the minds of a whole lot of voters, especially at this stage,” Parry-Giles said, adding that it doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable to the campaign. “It does reinforce, and I suppose resurfaces, what a lot of people find very appealing about Kamala Harris.”
Harris’s old cooking videos also may neutralize gendered attacks leveled at her, according to Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor of history, emerita at the University of New Hampshire who studies women’s presidential campaigns. “Conservatives have made comments about her not having children, and how this is somehow a liability in her life and in her quest to lead the country. Her interest in cooking is a counterpoint to that very stereotypical depiction of her.”
Harris has demonstrated with aplomb that female candidates can not only use cooking as part of their brand, but even the enjoyment of eating sweets. Some of her newfound room to maneuver in this space may be due to larger cultural changes. Being knowledgeable about food is a flex for Americans of Harris’s generation and younger. The rise of food television, celebrity chefs, and restaurants as entertainment has turned cooking into a desirable skill. And chefs see their passion reflected in Harris.
In August, dozens of the biggest names in the food world gathered online to make Harris’ recipe for roast chicken. Cooking for Kamala raised over $250,000. Suzanne Goin, the Los Angeles–based chef who helped organize the event was blown away by the enthusiasm, especially those who don’t normally participate in political fundraisers, but did because Harris is known as a food person. “This was a new level of connection.”
Congressman Eric Swalwell, who represents a district in California’s Bay area, helped organize this call alongside several others, back when a suite of identity-group calls helped launch the Harris campaign. Aware of Harris’s love of food and entertaining, Swalwell asked her for a recipe to build the event around. “Many other calls, for good reason, had been saturated by elected officials, and this one was uniquely just chefs.”
Swalwell was impressed at how the call created a sense of community. “It never felt political. The support for Kamala felt very organic and authentic. Many people who had never engaged in politics before, or done something outwardly facing, took part.”
Goin enjoys Harris’s vibe in her cooking videos, and relates to them as a restaurant chef. “You can tell she’s very focused and on a mission, she’s driving the project and knows what she’s doing.”
Chef and humanitarian José Andrés, who appeared in one of Harris’s 2020 videos, hopes her passion for food will translate to focusing food and nutrition’s role in some of the country’s most intractable problems. “Harris’s love for cooking for her family in a personal setting,” says Andrés, “This is what is needed for the food movement.”
The Harris campaign has also weaved cooking into her current run by sharing recipes from the vice president and her running mate, Tim Walz, in fundraising emails, a campaign official told Bon Appétit. Since September 25, the recipe-related emails have yielded $2.5 million to the campaign’s coffers, the official said, adding one fundraising email that did particularly well features Walz’s much talked about Hotdish recipe.
The other recipe that was a big haul for funds was one for Gwen Walz’s great-grandmother’s gingersnap cookies, which the campaign recently turned into a video. In the clip, she says she packs a hand mixer in her luggage and uses it to bake cookies that she delivers to field offices on the campaign trail, because “you never know when you’re going to need a good mixer.”
“The love of food and eating is real for both the Harris and Walz families,” a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson said.
In October, Harris visited restaurants and community centers putting together relief packages for Hurricane Helene victims. Andrés is also hopeful that if Harris is elected, she will see the same connection he has between disaster relief and keeping people fed. “We need to empower FEMA to be a much more proactive organization, to make sure no one is hungry or thirsty in emergencies.”
In the final sprint to election day, campaign food moments on both sides have clustered in the must-win state of Pennsylvania.
Earlier in the campaign, Harris pointed to her time working at McDonald’s as an important aspect of her middle-class background. It’s also maybe the most relatable job in America: The company claims 1 in 8 Americans have spent some time behind the register at a Golden Arches. On October 20, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Trump stepped onto the line at a closed McDonald’s and served pre-selected patrons through the drive-through. Protests raged outside, and McDonald’s workers were not impressed by his technique.
Throughout his political life, Trump has used consuming fast food in much more relatable ways. During his first presidential campaign, he broadcast photos of himself enjoying KFC and McDonald’s on his private plane rather than engaging in retail campaigning at local restaurants, and served a fast-food banquet at the White House. Former aides have shared his go-to McDonald’s order.
Both campaigns also, in these last days, invoked Philadelphia’s Jewish delis. A recent ad by a Jewish Republican group was shot in Hymie’s Deli on Philadelphia’s Main Line, sparking backlash from patrons. On October 23, Harris stopped by Philadelphia’s Famous 4th Street Deli with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and a slew of politicos to a crowd of cheering supporters. She took away an order of the historic Jewish deli’s pastrami on rye, but the TikTok video her campaign produced focused on her enthusiasm for their German chocolate cake.
Swalwell believes that authentic enthusiasm is one of the things that could only help in the closing days, when every little thing matters. “Any time that the country learns more about who she is and what she’s passionate about, she always becomes more popular. In final closing days, the more nontraditional ways we can learn who she is only going to help her. Food is not gonna lose votes. It’s only going to gain votes.”
