Her campaign pitch was moving, even high-minded. If Vice President Kamala Harris were elected to the White House, she would safeguard the ideals of a good nation. Voters had a choice, she said: democracy, constitutional rights and bedrock freedoms — or Donald J. Trump’s “chaos and division.”

On Tuesday, the nation replied. The answer from more than half of voters seemed to dismiss warnings that Mr. Trump was a threat to principles on which the country had been founded. Abstract truths mattered less, voters said, than tangible issues, like the ability to pay rent or concerns over border crossings. In a time of widespread distrust in institutions, Ms. Harris’s call to protect the nation’s norms rang hollow for many Americans.

In more than 200 interviews across the country in the four days preceding the election, voters, especially in swing states, spoke not of endangered democracy or institutions but of diminished prospects. Their words echoed repeated pre-election polling that showed that majorities of Americans believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction, even as the pandemic had ebbed, the rate of inflation was falling and crime and unemployment rates had remained historically low.

“Electric, water, groceries, my dues for where I live,” said Mary Chastain, 74, a retiree on a fixed income who voted for Mr. Trump on Tuesday in Waleska, Ga., a city of roughly 1,000 people in a rural stretch north of Atlanta. “Everything has gone up.”

“Something has to change,” said Idelle Halona, 51, of Phoenix, standing in line to vote for Mr. Trump on Tuesday. In the past two years, she said, her rent had nearly doubled and mounting mortgage rates had priced her out of homeownership. “I have wealthy friends, and I have friends who are living paycheck to paycheck. Everybody’s hurting. Everybody.”