This paper investigates the growing role of emotions in shaping policy views. Analyzing citizens’ social media postings and political party messaging over a variety of policy issues from 2013 to 2025, we document a sharp rise in anger on both the supply side (content provided by policy makers) and the demand side (emotional responses by citizens) since 2016. Content generating anger drives significantly more engagement. While anger in policymakers’ discourse follows cycles tracking shifts in political power, anger among citizens seems to have been persistently triggered and does not revert back. We then conduct two nationwide online experiments in the U.S, exposing participants to video treatments that induce positive or negative emotions to measure their causal effects on policy views. The results show that negative emotions increase support for protectionism, restrictive immigration policies, redistribution, and climate policies but do not reinforce populist attitudes. In contrast, positive emotions have little effect on policy preferences but reduce populist inclinations. Finally, distinguishing between fear and anger, we find that anger exerts a much stronger influence on citizens’ policy views, in line with its growing presence in the political rhetoric.