WASHINGTON — The White House is struggling to sell its economic message to the public despite fresh stock market highs and a red-hot labor market, as voters increasingly focus instead on rising prices and product shortages in assessing President Joe Biden’s performance.

The president’s approval ratings are sagging in the face of what administration officials call unmistakable signs of economic progress. Initial jobless claims this week reached a pandemic low. Wages are rising at the fastest pace in at least 20 years. And the stock market is up more than 35% over the past 12 months.

But public cheer over those gains is eclipsed by concern over an unusual economic rebound that is confounding hopes of a smooth return to full employment.

In a Fox News poll this month, 87% of those surveyed said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about rising prices. The same poll showed an abrupt 20 percentage point plunge in the president’s approval rating for his economic policies.

Gallup’s reading of public confidence in the economy has fallen for four consecutive months, reaching its lowest mark since the spring of 2020, when many businesses were shuttered by the pandemic. Even so, a record high percentage of respondents said it is a good time to find work.

Republicans are trying to capitalize on public dissatisfaction, hammering the president for delivering a bumpy recovery, while administration officials urge patience, saying today’s economic ailments are temporary. But 18 months into a nerve-rattling medical crisis, many Americans are in no mood to wait. With elections to decide control of Congress one year away, the president and his team have little room for error.

Public preoccupation with prices this week helped reshape Biden’s sales pitch for his core economic agenda, which promises fundamental changes in child care, climate, manufacturing, and energy policies. On Thursday, when the president introduced his $3 trillion framework for social spending and infrastructure investments, he stressed it would “reduce the deficit” and “lower the inflationary pressures on the economy,” claims that were absent from his original campaign rhetoric.

Some administration supporters say the president’s economic message has bowed too much to concerns about inflation and federal budget deficits and lost its original focus on boosting long-term U.S. competitiveness. In April, when the president laid out his economic plan before a joint session of Congress, he didn’t utter the word “inflation” once.

“Coming out of this crisis is messy. Shutting off the economy and turning it back on? We knew this was going to be difficult,” said Claudia Sahm, senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute. “The administration is making its job harder than it needs to. It is past time for them to go on offense.”

Biden officials are struggling to explain an economic recovery like no other.

Emerging from previous recessions, the main economic problem typically involved getting people to buy. Now the problem is getting them to produce. Instead of a lack of demand, the economy suffers from inadequate supply.

That leaves Biden aides wrestling with what one senior White House official called “a nuanced message.” As the pandemic is brought under control and Americans’ spending patterns return to normal, supply headaches should ease, allowing inflation to cool off around mid-2022, they said. Plus, most economists say the economy already has begun accelerating from its third-quarter lull, with Bank of America forecasters expecting annualized growth of 6% in the final three months of the year.

Yet inside the administration, officials have grown increasingly worried about the political fallout from these tough-to-explain economic conditions, according to multiple people familiar with internal conversations who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In a recent CNBC survey, 79% of those polled described the economy as “fair” or “poor” even though jobs are plentiful and COVID case numbers are in decline.

“You have to be very careful at this economic moment not to point to one thing and say it describes the entire economy,” said one senior administration official. “There are all kinds of cross currents going on, many of them very positive. This is a very dynamic economy. It’s not a simple story.”

Even as Congress creeps closer to passing Biden’s centerpiece social spending and infrastructure bills, officials say individual provisions can be difficult to explain and may take years to bear fruit.

In contrast, Americans already are feeling the effects of a clogged supply chain and inflation.

Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, said the administration should celebrate its multi-trillion dollar economic rescue program and paint the economy’s current shortcomings as the consequence of earlier U.S. failures to address the yawning rich-poor gap and inadequate infrastructure. That argument would support Biden’s $1.8 billion Build Back Better spending package as well as the $1.2 trillion bipartisan public works legislation.

“Biden from the campaign on has positioned himself as a transformational president, like FDR,” she said. “You want to be transformational? You have to sell the policy.”

Snarled supply chains are the root of the administration’s political predicament. Soaring freight costs, delivery delays and product shortages are contributing to 5.4% inflation and eating into economic growth.

On Thursday, Apple reported record quarterly revenue of $83.4 billion. Supply constraints, including a shortage of computer chips and manufacturing disruptions caused by COVID, cost it $6 billion in sales of iPads, iPhones and mac computers and will cost it even more over the remainder of this year, CEO Tim Cook told investors.

Across the administration, officials have convened a dizzying array of meetings to address the supply chain snags, but there is little the federal government can do to quickly alleviate the problems, the people familiar with the conversations said.

“It’s all people talk about,” one senior administration official said.

Administration officials see the current headaches as symptoms of the pandemic, not evidence of policy miscues. Spending on goods such as furniture, computers and clothing is about 15% above the pre-pandemic level while outlays on airline tickets, hotel stays and movies remain depressed.

Binging on goods helped Americans get through the work-from-home era, but it strained supply channels. Yet, in crafting his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the economic stimulus measure Congress approved in March, Biden consciously opted to risk spending too much rather than too little to avoid repeating perceived errors of the response to the 2008 financial collapse. That stance helped fuel the purchases that have tested supply lines.

“The system is moving more goods than ever and it’s moving them in different ways than it has in the past because as consumers we’re both buying more and we’re buying in different patterns than we have in the past,” said John Porcari, the president’s ports envoy. “These short-term difficulties are an illustration of really the work that we need to do to build a goods-movement chain that serves the country better in the future.”

The economy has produced a monthly average of 561,000 jobs this year. And the White House can point to economic data suggesting that their forecast of a passing economic storm is likely correct. A key monthly inflation reading that economists track – the core personal consumption expenditure index – has dropped for five straight months, suggesting price pressures may be easing.

But for millions of consumers, everyday metrics like the cost of food and shelter outweigh assurances that price pressures won’t last – especially with a gallon of gas at a seven-year high of $3.40, one dollar more than in January.

Supply concerns – congested ports, insufficient numbers of truck drivers, overwhelmed rail yards and warehouses – are drawing unusual attention at the highest levels of the government.

Porcari has engaged in weeks of intense talks with participants in every link of the supply chain, looking for potential improvements. Officials have scoured Southern California for vacant federal or state property that might act as a relief valve for some of the roughly 150,000 shipping containers clogging the docks.

Yet that search proved unsuccessful and 74 container ships remain stuck at anchor in San Pedro Bay, a flotilla that would have been unimaginable before the pandemic.

“We are in crisis,” Mario Cordero, executive director of the Port of Long Beach, told reporters on Wednesday. “There shouldn’t be any vessels at anchor.”

In an effort to demonstrate progress, administration officials have at times exaggerated their initiatives. More than two weeks ago, White House officials touted what they said was a move by the Port of Los Angeles to begin operating “24-7” to clear overloaded docks.

“They’ll operate around the clock,” said one senior administration official on an Oct. 12 press call, who could not be named under White House ground rules for the briefing.

But today, none of the L.A. port’s terminals have yet to begin operating around the clock, according to a port spokesman. Instead, terminal operators remain mired in talks with trucking companies and retailers about whether there would be adequate late-night and pre-dawn demand to justify the expense of extended operations.

Republicans are making a bid to capitalize on the recovery’s teething pains.

“INFLATION NATION!” former President Donald Trump, the party’s titular leader, said in an all-caps emailed statement Friday.

One day earlier, Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, called the economy’s 2% annualized growth in the third quarter “awful” and accused Biden of “bungling the recovery.”

A new Washington Post-Schar School poll of the Virginia governor’s race, found Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, who has bemoaned “runaway inflation” with a slight edge among voters on economic issues over former governor Terry McAuliffe, his Democratic opponent.

“The Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress spend all their time talking about things that people don’t care about,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist. “The average person – Republican, Democrat, Independent – they care about the price of gas, the price of food, ordering Christmas gifts. So as average people go through their everyday life, they’re reminded basically on an hourly basis how out of touch, how pathetic and how clueless the Biden administration is.”

Republicans also plan to use inflation and supply woes – along with the Afghanistan withdrawal and Democratic divisions on Capitol Hill – to support their indictment of Biden as incompetent, undermining Biden’s core pledge to restore capable governance to Washington, Bliss said.

Michael Gwin, a White House spokesman, said the president “has turned around the flatlining Republican economy he inherited with historic job growth” and had proposed upgrading the nation’s ports, highways and railroads only to draw “nearly unanimous” Republican opposition.

Still, research by pollsters Joel Benenson, a Democrat, and Neil Newhouse, a Republican, found that the president’s economic priorities are out of sync with voters’ concerns. Independent voters, a crucial voting bloc that Biden won in 2020, are turning away from the president.

“They are really fighting an uphill battle right now,” Newhouse said of the administration.