Rally Without a Surge? Sequential Crises and Asymmetric Mobilization in Polarized Contexts

Classic ‘rally-round-the-flag’ theory posits uniform increases in incumbent support during national crises. Yet, in highly polarized democracies, we argue this conventional wisdom overlooks how crises can instead generate asymmetric dynamics across partisan blocs, often without a detectable aggregate increase in incumbent support. We study Hungary under long-term populist governance during two sequential shocks within a single electoral cycle: the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (11 March 2020) and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (24 February 2022), the latter occurring in the run-up to the 2022 parliamentary election. Using the Vox Populi archive of public polls, we estimate segmented interrupted time-series models with pollster fixed effects, survey-mode controls where recorded, and precision weights based on trimmed sample size. Across specifications, neither crisis produces an apparent surge in support for an incumbent among likely voters. Instead, the war breakpoint coincides with a discrete weakening on the opposition side (≈ 4–5 percentage points in the baseline specification), with little evidence of compensating post-war trend change; this inference is directionally robust, but conservative ARMA(1,1) models attenuate the estimated discontinuity. Pulse-window estimates in the mass electorate indicate at most a modest and short-lived COVID-era uptick for the incumbent, whereas opposition declines are larger around the war window. Three original surveys (2021, March 2022, May 2022) help interpret these aggregate patterns: pandemic pessimism concentrates among opposition publics, whereas the war is interpreted through a ‘peace versus war’ frame aligned with the government’s campaign narrative. Overall, our findings suggest that sequential crises in polarized contexts reshape electoral competition not through uniform national rallies, but via asymmetric mechanisms, including bloc-specific vulnerabilities that contract opposition support and differential issues framing that benefits the incumbent. This reconceptualization of rally effects has important implications for understanding crisis politics in an era of heightened polarization.