President Donald Trump on Tuesday took the remarkable step of asking Senate Republicans for a show-of-hands on who they thought he should pick as the next Federal Reserve chairman, lawmakers in the room told reporters afterward.

The winner? Stanford University Professor John Taylor, one Republican senator said.

“I think Taylor won,” Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, told reporters, according to Bloomberg News.

Scott told The Wall Street Journal that the poll was only two candidates, Taylor and Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell.

Taylor, a leading academic, has forged close ties with congressional Republicans since the financial crisis, often testifying before the House Financial Services Committee about interest-rate policy.

Also read:Can a Powell-Taylor ticket at top of the Fed really work?

Taylor has argued the Fed should more closely follow a policy rule similar to the one that he created. His views resonated with Republicans uneasy about the Fed’s unconventional policy in the wake of the crisis that saw the central bank buy more than $3 trillion of bonds and mortgage-related assets to try to help the economy recover.

Powell faced some opposition in the past from conservative Republicans. Twenty-three Republicans opposed his nomination to a full 14-year term on the central bank in 2014.

The unease could stem from the standoff between congressional Republicans and the Obama White House over the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011. Powell, then a scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, supported the Obama administration’s assertion that failing to raise the debt limit posed serious downside risks for the economy. Many Republicans viewed those warnings as overblown but eventually agreed to raise the debt ceiling.

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who serves on the Senate Banking Committee, has expressed a preference for Warsh or Taylor over Powell.

“Senator Toomey believes we need to go in a new direction at the Fed and both John Taylor and Kevin Warsh would be fine choices,” said Steve Kelly, Toomey’s press secretary.

Toomey believes the Fed, in recent years, has conducted “unprecedented and dangerous” monetary policy and “fully participated” in the “overregulation” of the banking industry, Kelly said.

And congressional Republicans are not keen for Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who worked in the Obama White House, to get a second term.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the White House was not ready to make any announcement on who would be the Fed chairman.

Sanders said Trump was taking the decision “extremely seriously” and will have an announcement soon.