For a couple of years now, a narrative is emerging, according to which we have entered an age of emotion. Here, even-handed, unbiased, and purposeful decision-making is increasingly supplanted by affective or even “irrational” processes. In the political arena, pundits as well as scholarly accounts hold (right-wing) populist parties and politicians to be the main drivers of emotionalization. Such an account suggests that emotions have been less central to voting and party competition in earlier times. We disentangle the complex relationship between emotions and voting behavior and argue that emotions have always been central to voting behavior. When the historical cleavages were alive and well, emotions were structured along socio-demographic oppositions and thus epiphenomenal in their effect on voting behavior. So, while the general emotional alignment of citizens might have become more important in explaining vote choice over time, the impact of socio-structural factors on emotional alignment has decreased simultaneously. In line with Lodge and Tabor (2013), we treat feeling thermometers as a summary index of the general affective alignment with political parties and draw on survey data from Germany over 41 years to test these considerations. Understanding the changing relationship between emotion and voting is crucial if we aim to correctly characterize the challenges liberal democracy faces.