Inspired by recent approaches to the anthropology of democracy, this article investigates how democratic norms and the dynamics of national political economy influence political practices and ideals amongst political party activists — or party loyalists in Nigeria parlance— at the level of the local party branch in Nigeria. Anthropologists of youth and forms of informal political activism in Nigeria have affirmed how the patrimonial imperatives of national political economy are appropriated and contested on moral grounds from “below” in local settings (Pratten 2013). However, such anthropological analyses of the local have with few exceptions paid attention to the arena of “formal” democratic politics in Nigeria. This presentation seeks to do so primarily on four levels. Firstly, it reflects upon the ways in which historical legacies of political mobilization and institutional innovation continue to structure Nigeria’s experience of local partisan democracy. Secondly, it turns to contemporary party organizations and the ideals of party loyalists in the local branches of Nigeria’s two main political parties, the People’s Democratic Party, and the All Progressives Congress. The study focuses on the cases of Ado-Ekiti and Zaria, located in the politically divergent contexts of Southwest and North-Central Nigeria, to highlight the existence of ongoing contestations between party loyalists and party leaders and godfather financiers across Nigeria. Thirdly, the article argues that their vibrant participation contributes to shaping a particular understanding amongst loyalists of their relationships to political power. In this respect, rather than as victims in a politics of coercion, or as clients in patrimonial relationships of co-optation, loyalists’ construals of their own roles in political parties more-so reflect subjectivities of collaborators in purposeful, if contingent, political coalitions. Such coalitions exist between patrons and party loyalist, between those attached to the party and those rooted to specific leaders, and between those loyal to long-running party ideals and those whose participation is more clearly driven by personal ambition and patrimonial access. Finally, I argue that these coalitions are rife with what Tsing (2011) has described as “friction”, producing Nigeria’s ambiguous grassroots political culture in which powerful godfathers and party leaders are nonetheless afraid to be “lonely”, and wherein party switching can be tolerated and yet is still viewed as hypocritical. These contestations within grassroots politics cannot help but directly challenge the tropes of ‘godfatherism’, and of party decline, which have been dominant in academic and popular understandings of the political party, particularly in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. By so doing, the forgoing exploration also serves to emphasize the usefulness of an ethnographic attention to democracy, and of a political analysis which takes seriously the roles of political ideas and morality.