Do people thoughtlessly support positions taken by their party leaders, or carefully alter their beliefs when given reason to do so? Many studies examine the effects of cues from party leaders on policy preferences and cast voters as party loyalists, but rarely compare information from party leaders to information from other political and nonpartisan sources and thus cannot disentangle whether people rationally update their preferences or blindly follow party leaders. To investigate, I vary cues to identify the comparative strength of party leader cues and test issue importance and previous knowledge as potential moderators. I find that when asked to support or oppose a discrete policy, partisans respond to cues from party leaders but not other cues. When respondents respond with a continuous range of policy preferences, however, party leader cues are not inherently stronger — and are sometimes weaker — than cues from other sources. I find limited evidence to suggest either issue importance or political knowledge significantly moderates partisan sensitivity to elite cues, no matter the source. These results suggest that while party leaders draw partisans to express support for individual policy planks, leaders’ influence on underlying beliefs is far more complicated and voters engage in more cognition than previously suggested.