Senator Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds of thousands at campaign events and gaining momentum at a pace that suggests there is a real Democratic hunger for more populist and progressive—or, as Sanders calls himself, “Democratic socialist”—policies. That means Hillary Clinton, long presumed to be the front-runner in the fight for the Democratic nomination for president, needs to sharpen her rhetoric on regulation and income inequality.

Despite sounding an increasingly populist note during her campaign, Clinton is hardly known as a foe of the financial industry. She has given many lucrative speeches at the likes of Goldman Sachs, and her early denouncements of hedge funds and big banks were met with amusement and rolled eyes on the Street.

That’s changing, according to a new Politico piece by Ben White:

Some on Wall Street think powerful populist pitches from former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and Sanders, coupled with the heavy influence of noncandidate Elizabeth Warren, could force Clinton to come out harder on issues including breaking up the nation’s largest banks, imposing a financial transaction tax, putting individual bankers in jail, cracking down on executive pay, and otherwise beating up on an industry that six years after the financial crisis still suffers from rock-bottom public-opinion ratings.

It doesn’t exactly help Clinton’s case that Bill Clinton presided over heavy deregulation of the industry. Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein has previously said he would be comfortable with either a third Bush or second Clinton presidency, a line O’Malley used in his campaign announcement to condemn Hillary Clinton. (Interestingly, White quotes another anonymous “C.E.O. of one large Wall Street firm” who backed Clinton in 2008 but is now team Jeb Bush.)

“Hillary Clinton’s fought financial fraud and consumer abuses throughout her career,” campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson told Politico. “In the Senate, she’s stood up to big banks, worked to rein in executive pay, pushed to close the carried interest loophole, and fought to stop financial schemes that put families at risk. While her commitment to taking on this fight is clear from her record, she has been working on her policy plans and will have much more to say about this, and other issues in this campaign, after her launch speech this weekend.”

Clinton is expected to continue to ratchet up the tone she debuted during her “listening tour” of Iowa, when the candidate bemoaned the influence of money in politics and said that low-income truck drivers shouldn’t pay more taxes than hedge-fund managers. Few, however, expect her to go as far as O’Malley, who has called for the prosecution of big bankers, or Sanders, who has openly pushed for breaking up the country’s largest banks.

It’s almost refreshing how open nearly all parties are about their belief that Clinton would never argue for reining in the financial industry if she didn’t absolutely have to in order to make her way to the White House. Presumably waiting to see whether she can overcome that perception are Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York mayor Bill de Blasio, both of whom are progressive champions and have yet to endorse Clinton.

On the other side of that calculus is Clinton’s donor base, which is richly populated with folks who work on Wall Street. Clinton is struggling to raise the type of money that Bush has already raised before declaring his candidacy, and the Democrats have far fewer donors willing to write checks in the six to eight figure range than the Republicans do.

All of this makes for an ugly, rather dispiriting balancing act—one that we can all look forward to watching unfold over the more than 500 days left between today and Election Day.