News that Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska would be opposing DeVos’s nomination—making DeVos, in turn, Trump’s most contested Cabinet pick in the Senate so far—only kicked tensions up a notch. Congressional offices were, according to Politico, inundated with tens of thousands of phone calls and more than 1 million emails. On Thursday, the day before the Senate in a procedural vote agreed to advance DeVos’s nomination, Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted that the previous three days had been the busiest in Capitol-switchboard history.

To get an idea of how interest in DeVos stacks up against that in previous education secretaries, just look at how frequently people have googled her in the past few weeks compared with how often they googled Obama’s school chiefs, Arne Duncan and John B. King, Jr., when they were in her same position:

Supporters of DeVos have largely blamed teachers’ unions for the groundswell in opposition. Her “confirmation has generated so much interest on both sides of the aisle because she really represents a challenge to the status quo, and that frightens the education establishment,” said Jeremy Adler, the communications director for the policy arm of a GOP opposition-research firm that’s challenged attacks on her nomination, in an email. “On top of that, left-wing unions like [the American Federation of Teachers] and [the National Education Association] that are desperate to protect the status quo have bought the loyalty of Democrat senators by pouring money into their campaign accounts, which explains why they are marching along in lockstep to oppose her.”

But various news outlets have made it clear that the DeVos opposition extends far beyond the unions and their followers. Indeed, protests calling on Republican senators to vote no on DeVos have sprung up across the country —from Omaha, Nebraska, to Fort Collins, Colorado, to Charleston, West Virginia.

“The very amount of outcry that there’s been and the amazing reaction that’s occurred shows just how ... many thousands of Americans connect into this issue in a very passionate way,” said Chris Loss, a historian and education-policy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “To me, it’s evidence of just how mainstream education has become—unlike more arcane policy issues like housing and energy, issues that seem kind of abstract to the average voter. Education is pretty immediate, it's pretty visceral.”

Both PDK International’s Starr and Ferguson also spoke of the passion DeVos’s confirmation process has aroused—ironically attributing some of the anger directed toward her to pent-up frustration over the education policies advanced during the Obama administration. DeVos represents a distancing from those approaches—primarily test-based accountability and federal overreach—and has consistently insisted education should be left to state and local governments. But the outrage that people feel may in many ways be symptomatic of an earlier era. As Ferguson put it: “Sensitivity to [education issues] was fairly high anyway. Teachers and education leaders on the ground have really felt under the gun for the last decade, and in their view have been kicked around a lot by the media and by others and blamed for all the problems.”