1. Immigration reform: Can she clear a pathway to citizenship?

On the first leg of her campaign in Iowa, Clinton implied that she was in favour of comprehensive immigration reform. She didn’t spell out what she meant by that, however, and in the past has taken a much harder line.

In 2006, she voted in favour of building more than 700 miles of fencing along stretches of the US-Mexican border, and during her last presidential campaign opposed driving licenses for undocumented people – a position she was forced to reverse.

Clinton backed Barack Obama’s executive order that temporarily shielded millions from deportation – currently held up in federal court – but has been frequently targeted over her slippery positions. On Thursday, in response to a question from the Guardian, potential challenger Martin O’Malley said he was “glad Secretary Clinton’s come around to the right positions” on providing documentation for illegal immigrants.

Given that shifting stance, the bigger question remains: Will Clinton make clear whether she will fight for a pathway to citizenship? The country’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants – and a growing bloc of Latino voters also courted by Jeb Bush – await her answer.

2. The Keystone XL pipeline: Will she speak up?

The proposal to build a 1,179-mile extension from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to connect to an existing pipeline in Nebraska has become a major battleground: environmentalists think it would encourage the exploitation of “dirty oil” – and thus increase climate change pollution – while Congressional Republicans claim the project will create jobs.

Obama vetoed the plan last month, but so far Clinton has kept her head down on the issue. In 2010, as secretary of state, she indicated that she was “inclined” to back the project. More recently she has dodged the question.

Given that the Republicans are unlikely to admit defeat: Will she pledge to block any renewed attempt to build the pipeline on her watch?

3. Dark money: Is she serious about campaign-finance reform?

In her first public campaign appearance in Iowa (save for a coffee-shop stop in that Scooby-Doo Van), Clinton proclaimed that one of her four priorities would be fixing the dysfunctional political system and getting “unaccountable money out of it once and for all”.

She went as far as to say she would consider a constitutional amendment, presumably to overturn recent US supreme court rulings. That’s a tall order, given the need for a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states – at least 38 of the 50 – to get an amendment passed.

Besides, Clinton has herself been a huge beneficiary of the post-Citizens United world: she stands to benefit from an indirect windfall of up to $2.5bn that could be raised by Super Pacs supporting her candidacy such as Ready for Hillary, Priorities USA Action and American Bridge 21st Century.

Given the temptation of all that money, and all the TV adverts that could be bought with it: Is she serious about fighting back against dirty donations? And will she still take donations from Wall Street?

4. Wall Street: Does she want to crack down – or just look radical-ish?

Wall Street loves Clinton. As Politico has noted, titans of the big banks such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and James Gorman of Morgan Stanley see her as a pragmatist and friend. Which is perhaps why they are so willing to pay a basic fee of $200,000 every time she speaks at their events and lavishly donate to the Clinton family causes – five of the top 10 donors to Clinton in her years as a US senator were Wall Street banks.

Elizabeth Warren swears she isn’t running – but she is wowing the progressive wing of the Democratic party all the same, by calling for the government to act against sky-high executive compensation and attacking bank regulators for being lily-livered. So Clinton has started to shift, ever so subtly and without exact policy prescriptions, to the left.

In Iowa this week, Clinton said the deck was still “stacked in favor of those at the top”, and she wrote the encomium for Warren in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Next, Clinton will reportedly hire a former regulator who sparks fear on Wall Street as her campaign CFO.

But: How far does this new radicalism go? Will her newfound coolness toward the big banks translate into actual Wall Street reform?

5. LGBT rights: How much does she care, really?

This week, Clinton’s camp said unequivocally that she believes in same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. In doing so, she defused a potential controversy that may have pursued her through the primaries, even though O’Malley has all but called her a flip-flopper of convenience.

Clintonland’s announcement, coupled with couples in her campaign announcement video, came as a breath of fresh air for an LGBT community wary of a politician who had declared as recently as last year that marriage equality was best decided by individual states.

Many in the LGBT community are still left wondering: How far will her commitment go? Would a Clinton administration do anything to stop the anti-gay “religious freedom” laws proliferating at the state level around the country?

And would a second President Clinton end the ban in the US military on open transgender service? That issue will remain particularly sensitive, given her husband’s much derided “don’t ask, don’t tell” fudge on gay military personnel when he was in the White House.

Bill Clinton apologised for signing the Defense of Marriage Act just ahead of a supreme court decision, not unlike his spouse’s mea culpa on the campaign trail. She may not get by quite so easily.

6. Trans-Pacific Partnership: Will she stick by unions?

President Obama continues to press ahead in a rare alliance with Republican leaders towards a new trade agreement with 11 other Pacific countries. It would represent the most ambitious since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), championed by none other than Bill Clinton.

Trade unions such as the AFL-CIO and anti-secrecy groups are livid and have vowed to fight the latest pact, as have many senior Democrats in Congress, seeing the deal as a threat to US jobs and wages.

Hillary Clinton could find herself caught between a rock (a desire to back Obama and some big business) and a hard place (her union backers and many progressives). “It’s about policy,” the AFL-CIO boss told the Guardian this week.

So: Will she lean to the left and strike an anti-trade agreement pose, as she did during her last presidential campaign? Or will she stand by comments she made three years ago, when she called the TPP “the gold standard in trade agreements”?

Update: In a a statement released Friday, Clinton’s office said she “believes that any measure has to pass two tests”: helping the economy and national security – two of her four campaign talking points. “She will be watching closely,” the statement said, without saying much more – other than that the US “should be willing to walk away from any outcome” that does not meet said talking points.