WASHINGTON – Travel through the political battlegrounds in these final days of Election 2010 and it becomes clear how much the tenor of this recession-plagued country has changed in the two years since President Obama swept into office on his message of hope and change.

A far grimmer mood now pervades the electorate, one shaped not just by the immediacy of the economic distress that has hit virtually every household in the nation, but by fears that it might take years for everyone, from the average family to the federal government, to climb out of the hole created by the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Dissatisfaction with Republicans is even greater than with the Democrats, and voters have conflicted expectations of what should happen in Washington the next four years.

Everyone, it seems, has a grievance, whether it is with what they see as the creeping – some say galloping – socialism of the Obama administration’s policies, or what many believe is the abandonment of the middle class by the federal government or the feeling that Washington is broken almost beyond repair.

Clark Bisbee was on his way to pick up an absentee ballot in Jackson, Mich., on a recent afternoon when he stopped to talk about Tuesday’s election. Over the past few years, the 61-year-old said, he has seen the value of his house plummet, the value of his office building plunge, his travel agency fall on hard times and his once-healthy IRA shrink.

“I went from maybe having a net worth of a million and a half dollars to being underwater on everything,” he said as the wind whipped along the nearly empty downtown streets of this town of 33,000 about 100 miles north of Fort Wayne. “I’m angry,” the white-haired Bisbee said, repeating the words for emphasis.

“The mood is a combination of frustration and fear and desperation and down,” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who jointly oversees the NBC News-Wall Street Journal Poll.

“It cuts much deeper than the traditional anger that you see in so many elections. This one really goes to the sense of people feeling on the edge and how do I make life work. They’re striking out in all directions in order to just change things.”

Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center says disillusionment is the most powerful sentiment of the electorate as a whole. Trust in government is at low ebb. Evaluations of Congress’ performance are as low as they’ve been in two decades.

“We need something that is accessible and reachable that we can grab onto,” said Bonnie Murphy, who lives in Farmington Hills, Mich., in the Detroit suburbs.

“And we were promised that two years ago, and I know it takes time for things, but things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. … We just need help. I don’t care what party line politicians stand on, just give us something to grasp onto.”