Does attacking populists help or hurt parties come election day? While a growing literature finds that conflict between populist and mainstream parties is a major driver of affective polarization, and that this divide exists at both the mass and elite levels, no work has been done thus far examining whether the attacks mainstream elites level against their populist opponents actually persuade voters to support them over the populists. Using event data from the Integrated Crisis Early Warning Dataset from 13 European Countries we show that parties who behaved more conflictual towards populists in the run up to elections saw their vote shares decrease relative to the previous election. We show that this effect is entirely driven by incumbent parties. We also find suggestive evidence that attacks on populist parties in the run up to elections actually serve to increase their vote shares relative to the last election.