The outcome of the 2020 U.S. election between Trump and Biden evoked strong emotions. In U.S. American (Study 1; N = 405) and German (Study 2; N = 123) samples, we investigated how observers’ group membership (i.e. political orientation) and the social rank attainment of both candidates (i.e. dominance vs. prestige) predicted emotional reactions. Trump was generally perceived as more dominant, and Biden as more prestigious. However, perceptions of social rank attainment differed depending on the observers’ political orientation, either matching or not matching with the leaders (i.e. Republicans and Democrats, respectively). The candidate who did not share the participants’ political orientation was perceived as less prestigious and more dominant and elicited stronger contrastive emotions (i.e. schadenfreude, malicious envy) and weaker assimilative emotions (i.e. happy-for-ness, sympathy, anger), and vice versa. Crucially, dominance and prestige perceptions explained variance in the emotional reactions of more conservative and more liberal participants. Prestige positively predicted assimilative emotions and dominance contrastive emotions. Our work advances theorising by providing evidence that dominance and prestige perceptions contribute to the elicitation of various emotions. Furthermore, it suggests that prestige and dominance are not fixed characteristics of liberal and conservative leaders but depend on the observers’ group membership.