Politics is as much about "feeling" as it is about "thinking." In order to understand political emotions better, though, it helps to categorize the different kinds of political feelings possible, and what we colloquially term "emotion" should really be distinguished in various ways. For one thing, feelings that are object-specific (in other words, that derive from a reaction to a specific thing or person) differ from those that are diffuse (that is, they are not associated with a specific person or thing).
We can label this kind of emotional feeling "mood.