Conventional accounts treat diffuse support for democracy as relatively stable and distinguish it from evaluations of governments and electoral outcomes. But, what happens to democratic support when citizens with ambivalent regime commitments get the electoral outcome they want? We examine this question by bringing together research on winner–loser gaps, affective polarization, and authoritarian legacies. Using three-wave panel surveys conducted around the 2025 Chilean presidential and Portuguese legislative elections, we track individual-level changes in democratic support before, immediately after, and approximately three months after each election. Before both elections, highly polarized right-wing citizens were significantly less supportive of democracy than their left-wing counterparts. Yet following the radical right’s presidential victory in Chile, their support for democracy increased substantially, sharply reducing this gap. No analogous shift occurred in Portugal, where the radical right failed to enter government. We interpret these results as evidence that democratic support among affectively polarized right-wing citizens in post-authoritarian democracies is conditional on whether they perceive democracy can return their political side to power. The results challenge the assumption that diffuse regime support is necessarily insulated from electoral outcomes and reveal how affective polarization and authoritarian legacies condition the meaning of expressed support for democracy.