One view of presidential nominations in the United States [Steger, Wayne P. 2007. “Who Wins Presidential Nominations and Why: An Updated Forecast of the Presidential Primary Vote.” Presidential Research Quarterly 60: 91-97; Cohen, Marty, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller. 2008. The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Silver, Nate. 2016. “The Republican Party May Be Failing.” FiveThirtyEight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-republican-party-may-be-failing/] claims that the support of political elites is causally related to success in the nomination. The mechanisms for this relationship include party activists, who follow the cues party leaders send and provide necessary support to candidates in primaries and caucuses. This mechanism has not been explicitly tested. This paper explores the preferences of party activists in light of the unified elite preferences among Democrats and the lack of such unity among Republicans. Some activists in each party resist the signals from elites, but the resistance is far less widespread in the Democratic Party, where party leaders exhibited consensus support for the eventual nominee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]