Americans are afraid. Not for themselves, but for the country.

They fear the next generation in America will be worse off. Even some voters who say they are personally better off than four years ago say the country as a whole is worse off. And by wide margins, voters on the left and right say they’re concerned about the stability of American democracy…

“There are a couple ways in which the president has chosen an ineffective strategy,” said Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse. The first is that he has tried to tug on personal worries, like falling property values. “The second,” she said, “is telling people not to be worried about something that is in fact worrisome.”

That is, the pandemic. In the Times/Siena survey, independent voters the president needs to win were far more likely than Republicans to say that they fear the worst of the coronavirus is yet to come, and that they worry their own family will become ill.

The voters who are most concerned about crime and neighborhood decline, on the other hand, are not the voters Mr. Trump’s messages appear intended to reach: They are African-Americans, not white suburbanites. On crime, 38 percent of African-American voters described themselves as very concerned, compared with just 13 percent of white suburban voters. The difference is similarly wide on voters’ fears that the character of their community could change for the worse.