Citizens are rarely, we believe never, dispassionate when thinking about politics. Feelings as well as thoughts are triggered spontaneously by the people, groups, symbols, and ideas they see, hear, and ruminate about. Some of these feelings are incidental to the objects of thought, as when one's mood or some irrelevant environmental stimulus cues feelings that influence subsequent thoughts and behaviors. As demonstrated in Chapter 6, we may experience incidental feelings as relevant information about political objects, misattribute such feelings to political causes, and then rationalize these extrinsic feelings through the recollection of congruent considerations. Of course, our prior attitudes and beliefs about political objects also direct the course of information processing and serve as powerful anchors on subsequent thought. These intrinsic feelings and the affective contagion they arouse promote persistence of attitudes and motivated biases in the treatment of political arguments and evidence. “A fact is not a truth until you love it,” wrote the English poet John Keats. Showing similar intuition, the Irishman William Butler Yeats put it this way: “We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.” Citizens are inclined to think what they feel, and defend these feelings through motivated reasoning processes, whether the feelings arise from political causes or unrelated cues. Chapter 6 explored the effects of incidental feelings on political information processing and attitude change; here we will focus on intrinsic affect about political objects and how these prior feelings can drive political information processing in the service of attitude perseverance and polarization.