Pressed for a statement on the issue, Biden’s campaign told POLITICO that the former vice president is broadly concerned about economic concentration and would “aggressively” use antitrust law and other tools to ensure that “all corporations” do right by their workers and customers. But Biden views Warren’s singling out of tech as misguided and doesn’t think a president should tell antitrust enforcers which companies to go after, his campaign said.

A close adviser said Biden’s camp is reluctant to become drawn into what it views as Warren’s “weird litmus test.”

“It’s easy to say you want to go after ‘Big Tech’ and break them up,” said one senior economic policy official from the Obama White House who remains sympathetic to Biden. (The person spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss tensions that go back to the days of a presidency that Warren also served in.) “It’s a heck of a lot harder to come up with a coherent theory of the case of why that’s a better outcome for consumers, prices, and innovation.”

The Warren campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

But Warren’s approach looks to be working for her. Even where it might be least expected: In the last quarter of fundraising, she raised nearly a quarter-million dollars from employees of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, some of the very companies she has pledged to break up.

Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement at the Open Markets Institute, an advocacy group deeply involved in the push for antitrust enforcement on tech companies, argued that Biden is carrying on the Obama administration’s light-touch approach to the industry. Meanwhile, Warren is tapping into Americans’ emerging sense that something is not quite right with Silicon Valley.

“People are understanding that it’s not just some technocratic, boring area,” Hubbard said of the antitrust debate Warren has helped ignite. “It’s fundamentally about equality and freedom, the American way, the American dream. It’s at the heart of capitalism and what we think of core American values.”

Hubbard said she sees the Silicon Valley workers who give to Warren as acting in their own interests: Corporate breakups mean more employers to compete for their labor. Another factor is tech employees’ agreement with Warren’s push to fundamentally restructure the U.S. economy, said Peter Leyden, who runs a public policy-focused Silicon Valley media startup called Reinvent.

“It’s not contradictory or weird,” said Leyden, a former managing editor of Wired. “In general, tech workers in northern California, they’re roughly down with it — that we have to rebalance the economy from a grossly unequal society.”

The different tacks that Warren and Biden have taken on this massively powerful industry go back before the Obama era, to at least 2005, when the pair battled over bankruptcy reform.

That year, the Delaware senator and the Harvard law professor debated back and forth in a tense, substantive Senate hearing. At one point, Biden offered Warren the mixed compliment that she was making “a very compelling and mildly demagogic argument.”

The same phrase could capture the case Warren has made for breaking up tech, starting with a Medium post in March that said “it’s time” to break up Google, Facebook, and Amazon — pledging that when she becomes president, her administration will do just that.

And Warren has hardly let up on the issue.

She posted a billboard in San Francisco, near a train station frequented by tech workers, blaring the message “Break Up Big Tech.” More recently, after leaked audio recorded Mark Zuckerberg saying his company would be forced to sue a Warren administration if it went ahead with a breakup, Warren has leaned into the fight — tweeting again and again her disdain for Facebook. She even ran a deliberately false ad designed to jab Facebook over a newly announced policy on misleading ads, which she and other critics say lets President Donald Trump get away with running lies on the platform.

Biden, meanwhile, has said little. But in response to repeated requests, his campaign sent along a quote from a campaign spokesperson outlining his thinking.

“Vice President Biden is running for President to rebuild America’s middle class and a critical element of getting that done is ensuring that all corporations — including tech giants — are treating their workers and customers fairly,” read the statement from campaign spokesperson Mike Gwin. “To accomplish this, a Biden administration will aggressively use all the tools available — including utilizing antitrust measures — to ensure that these corporations are behaving in a responsible manner and contributing to a greater prosperity for our economy and middle class.”

People close to Biden say the former vice president is reined in by his reluctance to dictate targets and methods to regulators in a future Biden administration. By a combination of both tradition and statute, the country’s chief antitrust enforcers — the Justice Department’s antitrust division and the Federal Trade Commission — operate at a distance from the White House.

Recent history offers at least one example of a vice president-turned-presidential candidate paying a political cost for refusing to dictate to regulators.

In 2000, then-Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore balked at speaking out against an airport planned for the edges of the Florida Everglades, in part over worries about corrupting an ongoing Air Force analysis of the project. Gore instead called for a “balanced solution” — prompting some Florida environmental activists to endorse Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, who accused him of “waffling as usual.” Nader wound up getting 97,000 votes in Florida, far exceeding the 537-vote margin that delivered the state and the White House to George W. Bush.

That said, in the Trump era, political norms aren’t once they were.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump declared that his administration would block AT&T’s attempt to buy Time Warner, saying the deal would put “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.” After Trump won, his Justice Department indeed sued to stop the sale. And while a judge let it go through, AT&T couldn't get traction with the argument that the president had inappropriately meddled in the DOJ's decision making.

Biden is arguably in the mainstream of the Democratic field: No candidate has come close to Warren’s call for breaking up Google, Facebook and Amazon, even though the Democrats in Tuesday’s debate took turns detailing a wide range of complaints about Silicon Valley’s behavior and effect on society.

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The candidates proposed various solutions, including more aggressive taxation of tech companies, requirements for transparency on social-media ads, and a redefinition of the major online platforms as publishers. But none agreed fully when asked point-blank whether Warren's breakup proposals were right.

Instead, several responded that as president, they would install strong antitrust enforcers to go after monopolies in multiple industries. “We need a president who has the guts to appoint an attorney general who will take on these huge monopolies,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro called for "cracking down on monopolistic trade practices.” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said, “I will put people in place that enforce antitrust laws.”

Only two candidates clearly objected, in whole or part, to Warren's proposal: Entrepreneur Andrew Yang argued that “competition doesn’t solve all the problems.” And former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke lodged the strongest rejection of the Warren plan: “I don't think it is the role of a president or a candidate for the presidency to specifically call out which companies will be broken up. That's something that Donald Trump has done.”

Biden didn't get a chance to answer. But the divide between Biden and Warren is helping to define the terms of the debate, and it is shaping how an eventual Democratic president might navigate its relationship with the powerful and deep-pocketed U.S. tech industry.

The source close to the Biden campaign said the topic remains a “live issue” inside that operation, meaning the team is still working through how to talk about the way he would handle Silicon Valley.

The former Obama White House economic policy official said Biden will probably have no choice but to make that clearer. “My guess is that it will be inescapable, and inadvisable, for him to not talk about the need to have exceptional scrutiny on some of the excesses and misbehavior,” the former official said.

