A similar divide is on display among presidential candidates. The Republican field, led by Donald Trump, has largely denounced Apple’s position. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz forcefully criticized the company for resisting the court order, while John Kasich took the FBI’s side with a characteristically moderate tone. Trump went biggest of all: He called for a boycott of Apple—leading the charge by switching to a Samsung phone and firing off a series of typo-ridden tweets—and said its CEO, Tim Cook, is resisting the FBI “probably to show how liberal he is.”

While the Democratic candidates haven’t expressed outright support for Apple, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton showed balanced opinions on the case when they were asked about it at a recent debate. The candidates said they found merit in both sides’ arguments: “Frankly, I think there is a middle ground,” Sanders said, and Clinton called the situation a “difficult dilemma.”

Despite these recent developments, the biggest players in digital-privacy policy still consider it a bipartisan issue. When I asked a technology advocate, a prominent computer-science researcher, and a leading privacy hawk in the Senate about the polarization of Americans’ views about privacy, all three said the issue cuts across party lines.

Jake Laperruque, a privacy fellow at the Constitution Project, says digital privacy has brought together factions like “civil libertarians on the Democratic side, and people who are worried about government abuse on the Republican side.” He pointed to some of the unusual alliances that it has produced, such as the one between California Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Darrell Issa. “Those are not people who agree on much,” he said.

Nicholas Weaver, a computer-security researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, says that digital privacy at least “shouldn’t be” a partisan issue. He, too, points to libertarian elements in both parties that have come together to support privacy, often opposed by what he calls “deference-to-authority” moderates.

Both Weaver and Laperruque say the disconnect between Democrats and Republicans on the Apple-FBI court case may be fueled by a lack of information.

It’s not every day that a fight over encryption protocols takes over national headlines, and rarer still that questions about computer science and complex legal issues are raised on the national debate stage. Without much background about the substance of the Apple-FBI spat, Americans new to the issue may be leaning on their politicians for a model of how to feel about the conflict.

And Weaver says the Republican candidates may be taking their cues from Trump on the debate stage. “‘Terrorism! Terrorism!!!’ sells as a political issue, regardless of whether it’s actually relevant or significant,” Weaver wrote to me in an email. “So it’s natural that the other Republican candidates are following his lead.”