Wall Street worried about GOP in midterms — and it’s partly due to Home Depot, McDonald’s

Home Depot missing earnings and McDonald's flagging softer traffic isn't the kind of thing that usually leads a political story, but here we are. Wall Street reads those numbers and sees something more than a bad quarter. They see the working guy skipping the lumber aisle and thinking twice about a value meal, and they're asking whether that guy still shows up for Republicans in November.

That's a fair question to ask, and we're not going to pretend it isn't. The whole appeal of this coalition was that it spoke to people who actually swing hammers and drive trucks and stand behind counters, not people who trade options on their phones between meetings. If those same people are pulling back on Depot runs and Big Macs, that's not an abstraction. That's rent, groceries, and gas eating into everything else, and it shows up in earnings calls before it shows up in any poll.

Where we'd push back is on the leap from "consumer spending is soft" to "the base is bolting." Household budgets have been squeezed for years now, through multiple administrations, and plenty of working-class voters backed this White House precisely because they were tired of being told inflation was somebody else's problem. A rough quarter at McDonald's doesn't erase that memory. It just means the pressure hasn't let up yet, and voters know exactly who they blame for years of it piling up.

None of that means Republicans get to shrug this off. If the price of a value meal is a political indicator now, the smart move is to treat it like one instead of waiting for Wall Street analysts to explain your own voters to you.