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Gov. Scott Walker visited Mutt’s BBQ in Mauldin, S.C. during his first week officially on the campaign trail.Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — Gov. Scott Walker went back to his regular job on Tuesday, and it sounded like just another day. The governor was at work in the Capitol, his aides said, holding private meetings and receiving briefings from his executive staff.

Yet after Mr. Walker’s monthslong venture into national politics ended abruptly on Monday with his exit from the Republican presidential primaries, his return to life as a governor was greeted in his home state as anything but business as usual.

Some residents and lawmakers said Mr. Walker had been largely disconnected from state policy making of late and wondered whether he really intended to dig back into work here. Political operatives say Mr. Walker, who just months ago was considered a front-runner but exited the presidential field after sliding sharply in opinion polls, has relations to soothe in a state that feels a bit forgotten.

Even a Republican legislator — an important ally of Mr. Walker in his signature curtailing of labor union rights in 2011 — said he welcomed Mr. Walker’s full-time return to the state but felt uncertain about his precise role in Wisconsin now.

“A lot of people wonder if Scott Walker is too restless to come back,” said Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican majority leader of the State Senate. “He’s very dynamic. He’s always looking forward. I think there is a part of me and members of my caucus who are just not sure he’s going to stay around.”

On Tuesday, some residents were wondering the same thing. Did Mr. Walker, in the first year of his second term, have his eye on a federal cabinet position? A different elective office? A job in the private sector?

But his spokeswoman, Laurel Patrick, sought to put such speculation to rest, saying Mr. Walker “looks forward to continuing to work hard for the people of Wisconsin for the remainder of his term.” She said he was unavailable for an interview.

Some Republican legislative leaders said Mr. Walker would, indeed, carry on as before. They said that they had talked to him weekly about state policy, even as he campaigned in other states, and that claims that Mr. Walker was losing touch were overstated.

“I never felt like he left the fold,” said Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly. “The discussions I have had with the folks around him are that he loves being governor. He never ran for president because he didn’t want to be governor. He now goes back to the normal mode he’s in.”

But defining a second term as governor, some here said, may be Mr. Walker’s biggest immediate challenge. “He needs to get re-engaged,” said Mordecai Lee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and former Democratic state lawmaker. “He needs to create a new agenda. The hard part is that Wisconsin Republicans have accomplished so much of their top-tier agenda. I’m not sure what the second-tier agenda is now.”

Mr. Walker, a little-known county executive when he was elected governor in 2010, made a national name for himself by pursuing a firmly defined conservative agenda almost immediately. Arriving in 2011 as part of a national Republican wave that also flipped control of the State Legislature to Republicans, Mr. Walker pressed to limit collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, cut taxes, permit concealed weapons, expand school vouchers and add limits on early voting. His stance against unions, especially, won him notice from Republican donors around the nation and, after he survived a recall election, propelled his campaign for the presidency.

Yet Jerry Bader, the conservative host of a radio talk show in the Green Bay area, said that the governor’s presidential run had left conservatives less certain of Mr. Walker’s true positions and that he needed to lay out a second-term agenda as pointed and conservative as the first.

“He became timid,” Mr. Bader, a supporter of Mr. Walker, said in an interview. “He violated his own brand. What he needs to do is make people forget this ever happened. And you do that by going back to being that Scott Walker. He needs to surprise with another bold initiative, and if it sends hundreds of thousands of people to Madison again, then so be it. He has to establish himself as the undisputed conservative leader in Wisconsin right now.”

Along the streets of Waukesha, a city that favored Mr. Walker in the last election, residents seemed relieved on Tuesday over Mr. Walker’s decision to drop his campaign for the presidency. His critics said they were grateful he would not carry his policies to the White House, while his supporters said they were glad to have him back, focused on the state.

“He’s taken jobs away from the county and the state, despite what he says,” Bill Robinson, 76, said, adding that he was surprised Mr. Walker’s presidential race had lasted as long as it did.

Sandi Halliburton, 60, who was shopping at Kohl’s, said she was pleased. “He’s a great governor, but I think that whole presidential thing is too tough,” she said. “I love him as a governor.”

This year, even as Mr. Walker spent periods out of state trying to build national support for his candidacy, Republican legislators seemed to take on a broader role, lawmakers said. They pushed to repeal rules that set prices for public construction projects and to ban unions from requiring workers at private sector companies to pay the equivalent of dues.

“The Republicans were beginning to show a little independence from him; they didn’t accept everything in his budget this time,” said Fred Risser, a Senate Democrat who has served in the Legislature for nearly 60 years. Mr. Risser described the partisan political divide in Wisconsin as more polarized than in any previous administration. “He burned a lot of bridges here.”

Labor leaders and Democrats have clashed bitterly with Mr. Walker since 2011, and many sounded reluctant to see him return to the state Capitol. Some cast his departure from the presidential race as evidence that his policies on labor unions had been rejected on a national stage, if not by Wisconsin’s lawmakers. “Whether he’s exhausted his bag of tricks or not, though, I don’t know,” Stephanie Bloomingdale, the secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin A.F.L.-C.I.O., said.

This is not the first time Mr. Walker has stepped aside from a major race, and some who envision another presidential run for Mr. Walker are quick to recall it now. In 2006, Mr. Walker withdrew from an effort to run for governor here, deferring to another Republican, Representative Mark Green, who went on to lose to the incumbent Democrat. The move won significant points among state Republican leaders by avoiding a battle within the party, and it helped clear the way for Mr. Walker to run again, and win, in 2010.