MANCHESTER, N.H. — This could be the ending of a beautiful friendship.

Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, dressed in matching jewel-toned pantsuits, touted each other’s virtues Monday on a crisp, golden-leafed autumn afternoon at an outdoor rally on the main quad of Saint Anselm College.


“Get this, Donald: Nasty women are tough, nasty women are smart and nasty women vote,” Warren rallied the 4,000-person crowd. “We are gonna march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes, to get you out of our lives forever.”

Clinton, after embracing Warren in a tight hug, promised she was “so looking forward to working with [Warren] to rewrite the rules of our economy” and lauded the Massachusetts senator for her “track record of making it her mission to stand up against Wall Street.”

The happy rally represented an evolution for the two all-stars of the Democratic Party. Clinton and Warren entered the campaign season as wary competitors who had never forged a personal bond during their overlapping years in power in Washington, D.C. Carefully choreographed meetings during Clinton’s vice presidential search process, as well as a shared terror of a President Trump, brought them to a better understanding of each other than before — if still not quite friends.

But there’s tension on the horizon: If Clinton wins, Warren has promised to rattle the gates of a Clinton White House — as she did to President Barack Obama — pushing for progressive, anti-Wall Street crusaders to fill posts as top economic advisers and, most importantly to her of all, Treasury secretary.

Warren and her staffers have already been feeding to the Clinton campaign lists of individuals they would consider appropriate for those posts — and signaling in unsubtle terms those whose appointment they would fight to block.

For instance, progressives have signaled for months that they have binders full of opposition research on Clinton’s former State department adviser and current Morgan Stanley vice chairman Tom Nides, and that they would plan to oppose his appointment to a top administration position, including chief of staff. Nides has not signaled any interest in joining a potential Clinton administration. But he has remained close to Clinton’s campaign and has become the poster boy for those on the left looking to stop the public sector-private sector revolving door.

On Monday, however, Clinton and Warren were enjoying one more lap together as allies, coordinating their message to block Trump from ever entering the White House. “I am the daughter of a maintenance man who ended up a U.S. senator. Hillary Clinton is the granddaughter of a factory worker and she is going to be elected President,” Warren said, highlighting their common personal histories to the New Hampshire crowd. “We believe in that America.”

She highlighted their shared agenda on making college more affordable. “Hillary and [New Hampshire Democratic Senate Candidate] Maggie [Hassan] and I are determined to make debt-free college the law of this land,” Warren said. “We are determined to refinance that $1.3 trillion in student loan debt.”

Over the course of the general election campaign (she stayed on the sidelines during the primary fight against Bernie Sanders), Warren transformed from a potential competitor into one of Clinton’s most vicious attack dogs.

She has gone after Trump on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”; rallied the troops with a visit to Clinton’s Brooklyn campaign headquarters; campaigned across New Hampshire, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado; and spoken of her clear-cut support for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.

“I don't know about you, but I can listen to Elizabeth Warren all day,” Clinton told the Manchester crowd on Monday afternoon. “She gets under [Trump’s] thin skin like nobody else. She exposes him for what he is.”

But as the campaign draws to a close, Warren’s presence by Clinton’s side, 15 days out from Election Day, felt like the end of a brief moment when the two political agendas were unequivocally aligned.

“When we talk about personnel, we don’t mean advisers who just pay lip service to Hillary’s bold agenda, coupled with a sigh, a knowing glance, and a twiddling of thumbs until it’s time for the next swing through the revolving door,” Warren said at an August speech in front of the Center for American Progress, previewing how she will set her own agenda moving forward. “We don’t mean Citigroup or Morgan Stanley or BlackRock getting to choose who runs the economy in this country so they can capture our government.”

Warren didn’t namecheck those firms at random: Morgan Stanley was a direct head nod at Clinton ally Nides. And BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has long been mentioned as a potential Treasury secretary. Longtime Clinton adviser Cheryl Mills also sits on BlackRock's board of directors and is considered part of the Clinton State Department, pro-trade cabal that Warren allies trust the least of any circle of her advisers.

The tension — as well as the good faith efforts to find common ground — were revealed in emails hacked from campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal account and posted on WikiLeaks.

In an email to Clinton’s top advisers in January 2015, Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin wrote that he met privately with Warren’s chief of staff, Dan Geldon, and came away with some concerns.

“He was intently focused on personnel issues, laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of Democratic policy makers, was very critical of the Obama administration’s choices, and explained at length the opposition to Antonio Weiss,” Schwerin wrote to Podesta and other senior aides.

Warren allies often point to her successful takedown of Weiss, the Lazard banker whom Obama tried to appoint undersecretary of domestic finance at the Treasury Department, as an example of Warren’s real leverage.

“We then carefully went through a list of people they do like, which EW sent over to HRC earlier,” Schwerin continued in the email. Overall, he noted that Team Warren seemed “wary - and pretty convinced that the Rubin folks have the inside track with us whether we realize it yet or not.” Schwerin added that Geldon appeared “open to engagement and to be proven wrong.”

The WikiLeaks email hack has done little to soothe those concerns. In drafts of paid speeches Clinton delivered in front of financial institutions, she voiced a belief in Wall Street regulating Wall Street, noting that financial reform “really has to come from the industry itself.”

On the trail, however, she has vowed to close the revolving door between Wall Street and Capitol Hill.

Clinton allies insist any tension between Clinton and Warren is overblown and attribute it to the fact that a relationship between two powerful women automatically receives more scrutiny. They insisted that Warren is committed to Clinton’s success, before and after the election.

“They care a lot about the same issues,” said Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “They’re going to care about them after the election, too.” Palmieri insisted the campaign is “not focused on the transition or appointees.”

But the professional, Warren-aligned left certainly is already looking ahead, and it’s prepared to hold Clinton accountable for the promises she made during the campaign.

“As Sen. Warren says, ‘personnel is policy,’ and so progressives will watch nominations very closely to make sure each person seems likely to be skeptical of obviously self-interested corporate claims,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. “Some names I've seen floated are clearly inconsistent with implementing the Clinton agenda. It would be surprising to see them nominated, and could well provoke a fight with progressives.”