CLEVELAND, Tenn. — “The premise was good,” said Bob McIntire, 53, an insurance executive here in deep red Bradley County, where the local Democrats would have trouble filling up a phone booth.

The payoff, well, that was the problem.

On talk radio and in the conservative blogosphere, the bipartisan vote on Wednesday to reopen the government without defunding President Obama’s health care law was being excoriated as an abject surrender and betrayal by spineless establishment Republicans. But for glum and frustrated conservative voters on Thursday around breakfast tables in eastern Tennessee, in the shadow of a military base in Colorado Springs and on the streets of suburban Philadelphia, it was as much a surrender to reality as to Democratic demands.

To Mr. McIntire, that reality was a media environment in which conservatives don’t get a fair hearing, a unified and shrewd Democratic opposition, and a Congress hopelessly compromised by Washington deal making. For Matias Elliott, a cabdriver in Colorado Springs, the reality was the harm being done to the nation’s military and to the local economy. For Jean Naples, a homemaker in Doylestown, Pa., it was the “despicable” way the shutdown disrupted funerals for military personnel killed overseas and the way her husband’s medical supply business had suffered a severe cash-flow problem during the shutdown.

Many conservatives described a dispiriting gap between conservative ideals, which they believe inspire widespread agreement, and conservative tactics, which do not. The failure to stop the health care plan left Republicans like Ms. Naples pessimistic and disillusioned. “I’m just totally blown away by everything,” she said. “I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong anymore.”