It’s a bedrock assumption of American politics that a strong economy is essential to winning elections. It’s a key reason Republicans muscled through a big tax cut ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, and Democrats enacted a massive stimulus within weeks of President Biden taking office.

       It didn’t work out for Republicans in 2018, and it’s not working out for Democrats now. Jobs and wages are growing rapidly, and the stock market is hitting records. The public thinks good jobs are plentiful and their financial situation is solid. But Mr. Biden’s approval ratings are underwater and Democrats just lost the governor’s race in blue-trending Virginia.

       Some of this reflects a polarized electorate less swayed by objective evidence of how the economy is doing and more by hot-button social and cultural issues. It’s also because of an unusual economy whose problem isn’t a lack of jobs but shortages, inflation and daily disruptions wrought by Covid-19. Mr. Biden’s agenda wasn’t designed to address that sort of problem, and in some ways might have made it worse.

       Voters’ views of the economy used to influence their approval of the president. But since the presidency of Barack Obama, it’s been the reverse: party identification has driven views of the economy. In October 2020, with Donald Trump still president, a net 55% of Republicans thought the economy was getting better, according to Gallup. A net 67% of Democrats thought it was getting worse. Shortly after Mr. Biden became president, those shares flipped.

       Mr. Trump consistently got solid marks for his handling of the economy, but his approach to noneconomic issues—immigration, race, the pandemic—and his own behavior mattered more to voters. Similarly, many of Mr. Biden’s policies poll well but seem to get voters’ attention less than positions championed by progressive Democrats on policing, race and immigration. Exit polls found 55% of Virginia voters rated the state’s economy excellent or good but Republican Glenn Youngkin managed to turn the spotlight on how schools dealt with race and Covid—and won.

       To the extent the economy does matter, Mr. Biden has a different problem: His agenda isn’t well suited to fixing it. This stems from his team’s early conviction that Mr. Obama’s stimulus in 2009 wasn’t big enough, and the resulting sluggish recovery contributed to their shellacking in the 2010 midterms. Thus, they pushed to enact the biggest stimulus possible once Mr. Biden was sworn in.

       But Mr. Obama’s economy suffered from a lack of demand. Mr. Biden’s suffers from a lack of supply: businesses closed because of the pandemic, supply chains stretched because of changes in consumption patterns and millions of workers who have dropped out because of Covid, child-care issues or stimulus money. So Mr. Biden’s stimulus, by pouring more demand into a supply-constrained economy, fed inflation. How much is hard to say, but Republicans and even some Democrats such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have eagerly made the connection.

       Mr. Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure framework and what the White House calls the Build Back Better social and climate plan weren’t intended to address inflation, but he is now framing them that way, arguing they will reduce bottlenecks and defray the cost of child care, drugs and elder care. But many of the benefits are years away, and the near-term impact could be to aggravate inflation. In their early years, both plans add to the deficit, according to Congressional scorekeepers, thereby injecting additional stimulus into the economy. Moody’s Analytics predicts the two bills will raise economic growth over the next three years, yet also boost inflation an average of 0.3 percentage points.

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       Solving supply shortages and getting more people back into the labor force will require coming to terms with Covid, but there, too, Mr. Biden is hamstrung. Democratic voters in particular are so fearful of the virus that “they are operating as if the risk has to be zero before they can return to life like it was before the pandemic," said Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup. This appears to be holding back the economy more in Democratic-governed states than Republican ones, he said. “At some point there needs to be a corrective effort from our political leaders, from Biden himself, where there is strong encouragement to return to daily life."

       Starting Jan. 4, the Biden administration is requiring vaccination or weekly testing at firms of 100 or more employees. If the rules survive a court challenge, that might hasten the return of workers to the labor force. But vaccinations are now so polarized that that benefit might be offset by workers who quit. Over a third of unvaccinated workers polled by Kaiser Family Foundation said they would quit rather than be vaccinated or tested weekly.

       The good news for Mr. Biden is that, so far, the political damage from inflation seems to be small. According to Gallup, 5% of voters called it the most important problem facing the country in October, up from 1% in September but no higher than when oil prices jumped in 2008, and nothing like the 10% to 50% of the early 1980s. The odds are both supply-chain disruptions and Covid will have receded by next year’s midterms. The bad news is that the polarization that drives so many noneconomic issues to the fore will still be around.

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