In recent years there have been frequent claims that democracy may be endangered by polarization. A polarized environment, especially if it translates into affective polarization, may contribute to voters' tolerance, or even embrace of authoritarian leaders' undemocratic practices. In this paper we test these claims using a conjoint experiment in an arguably polarized political environment: Catalonia. We find that a leader's undemocratic attitudes --operationalized as casting doubts about the rules of the game after a defeat-- are a key driver of voter's rejection, even more consequential than ideological or policy distance. This is true across the whole policy space. Voters not only reject candidates (and citizens) with undemocratic attitudes, but also refuse to trade off democratic norms by proximity in the ideological and territorial dimensions. The negative effect of undemocratic attitudes holds irrespective of distance. However, intense affective polarization moderates the effect: for those citizens with high scores of partisan or social affective polarization, the effect of democratic norms is significantly attenuated. Overall, our results bring good news for democracy: even in a polarized environment, and in a context of political conflict over a national identity dimension, citizens seem to intensely dislike undemocratic attitudes.