What incentives govern the choices of elected aspiring when allocating subnational resources? Recent scholarship has increasingly argued that, when countries face democratic erosion at the hands of aspiring autocrats, one of the most important bulwarks against backsliding is local government (Kjaer 2012; Freeman and Perello, 2022; Sells, 2020). However, the degree to which resilience can manifest at the subnational level is dependent on the ability of local officials to convince voters of their competence (Farole 2021) and use resources to build their base (Michel, forthcoming). This is complicated by the fact that the purse strings of municipalities are often controlled by executive discretion, with limited power to set tax rates or collect user fees. In this paper I argue that aspiring autocrats obey partisan and punitive redistributive incentives, free of constraints that may hold democratic governments in check. I illustrate these incentives on the case of Poland (2006-2024), which withstood a substantial episode of democratic erosion at the hands of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS) government (2015-2023). I collect an expansive dataset of municipal finances and electoral results over all 2.479 gminy (municipalities), to which I apply a novel classification process to determine municipal partisanship. These data are used to explore the incentives that govern local redistribution by comparing periods of moderate governance to aspiring autocrat rule. This paper presents a contribution to the literature on democratic resilience, but also to the wider literature on redistribution and fiscal decentralization.