But if voters often punish a president for pushing unpopular policies, they rarely seem to reward a president for enacting legislation. Instead, voters seem to reward presidents for presiding over peace and prosperity — in a word, normalcy.

Today, Mr. Biden is not seen as presiding over the long promised return to normalcy. Maybe that will change in the months ahead. But Mr. Biden’s policy agenda is not expected to do much to help his approval rating so long as Americans do not believe that agenda responds to the most immediate issues facing the country.

It’s hard to think of recent examples of voters overcoming their skepticism of a president because of a popular policy program. If anything, it’s the relatively unproductive Democratic presidents — like John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in his second term — who managed to avoid midterm drubbings over the past 80 years. Not even Medicare and Medicaid seemed to help the Democrats in 1966 and 1968. They were crushed.