Likewise, in those previous three midterm exit polls, between 82 and 84 percent of voters who disapproved of the president voted against his party’s candidates for the House. But on Tuesday, that number soared: Fully 90 percent of Trump disapprovers said they voted for Democrats for the lower chamber. That was the worst performance for the president’s party among disapproving voters since Ronald Reagan in 1982.

Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening.

Political strategists in both parties generally consider it easier for senators to establish an independent identity from the president. But attitudes about Trump were a powerful force in those races, too. Exit polls were conducted for 21 Senate contests in which a Republican faced a Democrat. Democrats won at least 90 percent of voters who disapproved of Trump in 15 of those 21 contests, and up to 89 percent in five more. Scandal-tarred New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was the only Democratic candidate to win a smaller share of voters who disapproved of Trump, at 79 percent.

Meanwhile, Republicans carried at least 90 percent of Trump approvers in seven of the 21 Senate races, and between 80 and 89 percent in 13 others. Joe Manchin in West Virginia was the only Democrat to hold his Republican opponent to less than 80 percent of Trump supporters.

The power of these relationships shaped the outcome in both chambers. In total, the tightened connection between votes for Congress and attitudes about Trump was a negative for Republicans because significantly more voters disapproved of him (54 percent) than approved (45 percent) in the national House exit poll.

Those topline numbers contained a stark divergence that drove the pattern of congressional results. This year’s exit poll found that just over three-fifths of whites without a college degree approved of Trump’s performance. That helps explain why Democrats made only very modest gains in rural or heavily blue-collar House districts. (Northeast Iowa and two upstate New York seats were among the few exceptions.)

That support also powered the Republican Senate victories in the preponderantly white and blue-collar heartland states of Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. Huge margins among working-class whites also keyed the apparent GOP wins in the Florida and Georgia governor’s races, and in Florida’s close Senate race. The biggest exceptions to this pattern were two folksy Democrats, Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana, and the populist Sherrod Brown in Ohio, who each won in predominantly blue-collar states where a majority of voters said they approved of Trump’s performance.

On the other side of the ledger, almost exactly three-fifths of whites with a four-year-college degree or more disapproved of Trump, as did just over 70 percent of nonwhites. That gale-force rejection powered the sweeping Democratic gains in white-collar and diverse metropolitan House districts across the country. Democrats swept away Republicans clinging to House seats in otherwise blue metropolitan areas in and around New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Tucson, Seattle, and the northern exurbs of Los Angeles.