That surge in white-collar support sparked the gains in suburban seats that produced the Democrats’ first House majority since 2010. But the persistence of Trump’s appeal with blue-collar voters, amplified by his frenetic and fear-infused final campaign swing, frustrated Democratic hopes in several districts with substantial rural populations that they had earlier hoped to capture, including seats in Kansas and Kentucky. Trump also helped Republican Ron DeSantis win the Florida governor’s race by following the same model the president employed to carry the state in 2016: big margins in small places, which allowed them to overcome commanding Democratic advantages in the urban centers. Rick Scott, whose Florida Senate race appears to be heading for a recount, benefited from this dynamic as well.

On each side there was some regional variation in this pattern. The Rust Belt Democratic Senators who won reelection in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan each pushed past 40 percent among white voters without a college education. That was hardly a commanding performance, but it represented at least some recovery from Hillary Clinton’s anemic showing in the same states in 2016—and it is sure to encourage Democrats who want to focus on recapturing those states as the most straightforward path back to the White House in 2020.

Conversely, the Democratic performance among college-educated whites in the South—who tend toward more conservative positions than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly on social issues—continued to lag. O’Rourke did capture just over two in five college-educated whites, which was a notable improvement over earlier Democrats in Texas (who have often struggled to win more than 30 percent of those voters), but it wasn’t enough to overcome Cruz’s distinct advantage among non-college whites, who gave him about three-fourths of their votes, according to the exit poll. Abrams, even more strikingly, lost over four-fifths of whites without a college degree, while attracting just a little over one-third of those with one. That was also better than Georgia Democrats had done in the past, but—pending the final ballot counting—not enough to win. The key to Gillum’s loss, a big letdown for Democrats, may have been his inability to win more than about one-third of college-educated white men (even as he won nearly three-fifths of white women with a college degree).

Looming over all of this was the intensely divisive figure of Trump. As noted above, his approval rating stood at 50 percent or more in almost all of the states where Republicans notched important victories. But nationally, just 45 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance, while 54 percent disapproved, according to the exit polls. And while 88 percent of those who approved of Trump said they backed Republican House candidates, fully 90 percent of those who disapproved said they voted Democratic. The correlation between attitudes toward the president and the vote in congressional races has been growing in recent years. But among both Trump’s supporters and his detractors, the connection between attitudes about the president’s performance and the House vote on Tuesday night was the highest recorded in exit polls since at least 1982.

Those numbers quantify the outsized shadow Trump is casting on American politics. Even as suburban voters in major metro areas from coast to coast registered an emphatic statement of discontent with his direction and performance, the small-town, exurban, rural, and blue-collar areas that powered his victory reaffirmed their commitment to his cause. Tuesday’s results only widened the persistent gulf between those coalitions and set up even more intense conflict between them moving forward.