While Hillary Clinton comes off as cozy with Wall Street bankers in emails released by WikiLeaks, there’s one group that sees potentially positive signs in the hacked messages: progressives.

Some of those who have been pushing hardest for a crackdown on corporate excess say many of the emails underscore how she’s trying to wrestle with liberals' demands and come to grips with the growing populist sentiment in the Democratic Party.

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There are numerous examples of the campaign trying to figure out where it stands in relation to Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the party’s two most visible liberal standard-bearers. And at times, Clinton’s attempts at a leftward shift caused some in the finance industry to feel shunned by the former New York senator.

"The campaign was clearly evolving toward the left in the exact sort of way I imagine Bernie Sanders was seeking to push her," said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Revolving Door Project, which is aligned with the Warren wing of the party.

"They realized they needed to become more and more progressive. They realized they needed to shift on trade and on banks. They recognized that speeches given in 2013 are not the type of rhetoric they would ever use going forward."

While Clinton is by no means divorcing herself from Wall Street, the stolen messages indicate that her campaign has tried to thread the needle between an industry that helped finance her rise to power and an ascendant liberal movement fueled by public anger against banks.

How a President Hillary Clinton would manage this precarious dance on high-profile appointments and key policy initiatives, from taxes to trade, could determine the success of her first years in office.

“By the end of the winter, Clinton is going to get sniping from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders if she is not aggressive enough going after Wall Street,” said Greg Valliere, chief global strategist at Horizon Investments. “She is going to have to give the left some things early, including on key Cabinet nominations or there will be an immediate fissure.”

The last year provided a stark preview of the ideological stresses that will greet Clinton should she win the White House.

Tension between the Democratic nominee’s more pragmatic, Wall Street-friendly history and the liberal wing of the party dominated the fractious Democratic presidential primary. Clinton has always struggled to keep pace with a populist movement — driven by continued public anger at Wall Street — that drove Sanders’ insurgent campaign.

The revelations from the hacked Clinton campaign emails, coupled with the nominee’s paid speeches to Wall Street, further thrust the chasm into public view.

But some progressives say the WikiLeaks emails show Clinton's team appeared to be aware of how much the party had changed since she last ran for president.

Her advisers agonized over Warren’s influence, and one email shows that Clinton at one point considered endorsing the Massachusetts Democrat's proposed solution to breaking up the nation’s largest banks.

“I am still worried that we will antagonize and activate Elizabeth Warren by opposing a new Glass-Steagall,” Clinton consultant Mandy Grunwald wrote in October 2015, citing the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking and was repealed under President Bill Clinton. “I worry about defending the banks in the debate.”

In August 2015, Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, a longtime Clinton adviser, sent the former secretary of State an email promoting a potential financial-transaction tax.

"I'm wary of the growing economic populism on the center-left and I believe an FTT is the kind of bold proposal that both makes sense on policy grounds and achieves important political objectives," Tanden said.

Another adviser, Gene Sperling, later said the campaign should be more specific about a "risk fee" that Clinton was proposing on the largest financial institutions. Sperling said it would "lead to lots of estimates of how much it will cost the major banks that our fee focuses on."

"So with detail you could get discussion like will HRC's proposal mean [Goldman Sachs] and [JPMorgan Chase] owe $8 billion or $18 billion," Sperling added. "Worse things for us. Worth considering."

Well aware of growing public animosity toward Wall Street, the Clinton campaign has made clear that she would fight to defend post-crisis banking regulations and in some cases go beyond policies that were enacted as part of Dodd-Frank.

In the wake of the fake accounts scandal at Wells Fargo, Clinton made the nation's third-largest bank a centerpiece of a policy platform aimed at combating corporate excess.

“Hillary Clinton has been in the trenches fighting for working families her entire life," said Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a financial industry critic and the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. "She has rejected [the Trans-Pacific Partnership] and laid out a strong agenda to crack down on Wall Street abuses.”

While the campaign rhetoric and policy pledges have allowed Clinton to make inroads with skeptical market-reform advocates, it has come at the expense of her relationship with business allies.

“She makes clear that a potential Clinton Administration would be four more years of lots more financial industry regulation," Fidelity Investments vice president of government relations Andrew Vermilye said in an email to the campaign in December 2015. “Lots of harsh rhetoric, hyperbole and vitriol. Lots of hatred towards financial services broadly. She really can’t walk back from this.”

A Fidelity spokesman said the company does not have an official point of view on presidential candidates.

To be sure, other revelations from WikiLeaks paint a picture of Clinton's close relationship with Wall Street. In her paid speeches, she spoke of the positive work done by the industry and suggested in 2013 remarks to Goldman Sachs that she wanted Wall Street to help “figure out” how to prevent the next crisis. And in remarks to Deutsche Bank she said “there's more that can and should be done that really has to come from the industry itself.”

By the time Clinton was ready to launch her campaign, her advisers were prepared to push back.

“[T]he data are very clear on the potential consequences,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in a March 2015 email as part of a string on former President Bill Clinton’s speeches. “Wall Street ranks first for Iowans among a list of institutions that ‘take advantage of every day Americans’, scoring twice as high as the general election electorate.”

Hillary Clinton’s comments have added urgency to progressive efforts to block anyone from the banking industry from getting top jobs in the West Wing, at the Treasury Department and regulatory agencies. That pressure is only going to rise should Clinton win. Another set of emails show an aide to Warren laying out a case against the “Bob Rubin school of Democratic policymakers.”

“The WikiLeaks revelations make it clear the Clinton team was paying attention to this internally,” said Kurt Walters, campaign director at Rootstrikers, a financial reform-focused advocacy group. “That's a heartening sign, and I think the step now is to make sure that the conversations going on in the transition team are still responsive to that pressure even after the prospect of a primary challenge is no longer there.”

Meanwhile, progressive groups are demanding that the Senate Banking Committee not include any new Wall Street-friendly members. And on Friday, Warren called for President Barack Obama to demote SEC Chair Mary Jo White. Obama has declined to do so, but Warren will certainly push Clinton to replace White, something that would not please Wall Street donors, who like the SEC chair’s cautious approach.

Wall Street executives who donated to Clinton and paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees over the years say they would not expect the Democratic nominee to lard her administration with bankers in key posts or support rolling back the Dodd-Frank law. But they are expecting at least some nominees with business experience and want to see deals with Congress on legislation including infrastructure investment along with lower corporate tax rates.

Few expect her to pick someone like Blackrock CEO Larry Fink or Blackstone President Tony James as Treasury secretary. But they do hope for some more business-friendly appointments, such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Federal Reserve Board Member Lael Brainard or TIAA President and former Federal Reserve Vice Chair Roger Ferguson as Treasury secretary.

They also want to see a White House chief of staff with credibility among progressives. The left could probably accept someone like Tanden of the Center for American Progress as chief of staff. It would revolt if Clinton opts for someone like Tom Nides, a former top Clinton adviser at the State Department now at Morgan Stanley.

At Treasury, the left has already shown coolness to the idea of Sandberg because of her ties to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Facebook’s efforts to lower its tax bill. There is also strong opposition to Brainard who is viewed as too pro-free trade. If Clinton can’t get someone like Sandberg or Brainard confirmed, Wall Street fears a Clinton administration would be in thrall to the left on every conceivable issue.

“Hillary’s biggest challenge will be balancing the current populist sentiment with her own more pragmatic governing philosophy,” said one top Wall Street lobbyist who like a dozen others interviewed for this story did not want to be identified by name for fear of angering the Clinton campaign. “Having some people around her with executive and markets experience would be a good thing. And no one expects her to ease up on regulations but if she wants to get to 3 or 4 percent growth and have a shot at reelection she can’t layer on a whole bunch of new regulations and she has to do infrastructure and corporate taxes and immigration reform.”

But progressives led by Warren and Sanders will likely demand that Clinton pursue their policy goals through key personnel decisions, meaning Clinton could get quickly dragged into nomination fights that could slow down any early momentum. And all the hopes on Wall Street for a growth-friendly economic package could get decimated early on if the left decides to torpedo anything that lowers tax rates on big corporations.

Some analysts suggest there is a playbook for Clinton to manage pressure from the left early in her administration. They say she could hand progressives big wins on regulatory nominations while picking the White House staff she wants and crafting legislation that will require liberals to swallow some compromises.

“She will probably appoint aggressive and respected regulators as well as attorneys for the Department of Justice staff. And for her own staff, she will pick who she wants,” said Shawn Golhar, an analyst at Barclays. “She is not going to swing for the fences on a liberal agenda because she just doesn’t seem to be that way.”