Hillary Clinton faces doubts from two different parts of the Democratic Party about her likely presidential run, even as she remains the overwhelming favorite to win the party’s nomination.

A camp of liberals, particularly those aligned with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, are worried Clinton will be unwilling to embrace some progressive ideas, like increasing Social Security benefits and breaking up large banks. Another group of Democrats, particularly strong backers of President Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries, say they are worried about the perception that Clinton’s potential candidacy has become too much about achieving her long-sought goal of being elected president rather than her vision for leading the country.

“The biggest question is will she rise to this economic populism moment really focused on big ideas, as opposed to no ideas, small ideas or lip service to big ideas,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which strongly backed Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign. “Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up the big banks, expanding Social Security benefits instead of cutting them and something big on creating jobs and making college more affordable, these are bread and butter ideas that affect people’s lives.”

In interviews with NBC News, influential Democrats and progressives acknowledged that Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

But they had differing views on how she should handle some of the key questions around her campaign.

What issues should Clinton focus on? There is “strong support for free community college, but stronger public support for debt-free college at all public universities,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “The American public is there. The risk of having things that sound like big ideas, but are smaller-scale, is they won’t actually affect people’s lives.”

Some Democrats said the president “sounded like Elizabeth Warren,” the firebrand freshman senator who has tried to push the party to the left. His State of the Union address could shape the debate for the 2016 presidential elections

Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said afterward that there was only one “sore thumb” in his speech — his proposal for more power to unilaterally approve trade deals.

“President Obama is sounding more like Elizabeth Warren, and that’s a good thing for Democrats because her economic populist ideas are super popular,” said Taylor, whose group is pushing Democratic candidates who may challenger former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next year to embrace Warren’s policies.

“On issues like taxing the rich and making college affordable, the president took giant steps in the right direction — and Americans want Democrats to go even further in the direction of big, bold, economic populist ideas.”

The 2016 presidential election could cost as much as $5 billion, according to top fundraisers and bundlers who are already predicting it will more than double the 2012 campaign’s price tag.

Adam Green, co-founder of the liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee PAC, which is pressing for candidates to adopt progressive policies more aligned with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), said there’s “definitely” space for a viable Clinton alternative despite her fundraising prowess.

“The big money matters more in the presidential race after New Hampshire and Iowa,” said Green.

He said Clinton could scare off challengers not by raising money but by reaching out to progressives.

“Clinton can close that political space by following the Warren wing,” Green said. “Early money is important for credibility but the big issue comes when a candidate cuts corners on policy to get more big money. That’s the problem.”

State of the Union or 2016 stump speech?

That’s what Washington’s financial regulatory watchers are wondering as they review the tax policy plan President Obama will formally unveil on Tuesday during his State of the Union address.

“It’s a rhetorical tax proposal designed to placate Elizabeth Warren and other economic populists,” said Fratto, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based financial services communication consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies.

That’s good news to Adam Green, co-founder of the liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who has been pushing for Obama and Democrats to follow Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) to the left and push for policies opposed by the business community.

“The more President Obama continues marching in her direction by proposing big populist ideas, the better positioned Democrats will be in these fights — and the more Democrats will win,” said Green.

In 2014 the Administration wanted Antonio Weiss, a Wall Street dealmaker at the investment bank Lazard, for the number three job at the Treasury Department. A small coalition of senators on the Banking Committee and progressive groups mounted opposition, and yesterday, Weiss withdrew.

The Weiss affair will certainly lead to the White House thinking twice about future nominees. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has already floated “progressive economic thinkers” like former Senator Byron Dorgan and economist Dean Baker for the Treasury spot. At the very least, in the future you should expect Warren to be consulted on a nominee before, and not after, the announcement.

So why is the Warren wing of the party ascendant? First, Democrats are languishing with their smallest House minority since the 1940s, and a state legislative minority dating back to the pre-FDR days. Part of the success stems from the ideological winnowing of the party, through losses in red states and purple districts. There’s less of a battle of ideas to be fought. But that doesn’t fully account for the change during just the last few weeks.

If you aren’t immersed in the world of liberal activists, you may not appreciate just how much attention, admiration, and outright worship Warren gets there. She has become the focus of an extraordinary amount of strategizing and organizing on the left, so when she declared that she was going to fight Weiss’ nomination, the left picked up the ball and ran with it. For instance, the liberal group Credo Action got 163,000 signatures on a petition to oppose Weiss. But look at the petition: The headline on the page reads, “Stand with Elizabeth Warren: No Wall Street bankers running Treasury,” and features a picture of the Massachusetts senator. Or check out the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, one of the leading groups seeking to elect liberal Democrats and push the Obama administration to the left. On PCCC’s home page, Warren’s name appears eight times; its blog has posts with such titles as, “How to Win Like Elizabeth Warren” and “PCCC and Allies Amplify Elizabeth Warren’s Message.” Talk to a liberal activist about what progressives ought to be doing, and you’ll only have to wait about 10 seconds before Warren’s name comes up.

A coalition of progressive groups is hoping that President Obama’s proposal to offer two free years of community college to qualifying students is just a start.

The groups say the proposal should be just the first step toward cost-free four-year public colleges.

The Progressive Campaign Change Committee (PCCC), Democracy for America (DFA) and the liberal Daily Kos Website — sent out petitions asking their members to pledge their support for Obama’s plan and work toward “debt-free” higher education.

“Free community college is a first step toward debt-free college at all public institutions of higher learning,” the PCCC said in its emailed petition.

A spokesperson for the group said that their email had yielded close to 30,000 signatures so far, and that they intend to lobby lawmakers on the issue.

PROGRESSIVE GROUPS CHEER, via Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee: “This is a victory for the Elizabeth Warren wing of American politics. Voters in red, purple, and blue states are done with Wall Street and special interests running our government and our economic policy. To inspire the public, Democrats must fight for the little guy.”

Warren, the firebrand Democratic senator from Massachusetts, had vehemently opposed Weiss’s nomination and led a progressive charge against him. Warren and other progressives, who have become locked in an ongoing battle over the future of the Democratic Party, argued the Lazard banker Weiss was too close to Wall Street.

“We’ve already seen that the new Republican Congress is going to aggressively attack the Dodd-Frank Act,” Warren said in a statement. “… The risk of another financial crisis remains too high, and we should be strengthening financial reforms, not rolling them back to benefit Wall Street.”

Progressive groups backing Warren’s push against Weiss cheered the news Monday evening. Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said it was a “victory for the Elizabeth Warren wing of American politics.”

On Monday, one of the leading Democratic policy-makers in the House, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, offered a new and more aggressive economic blueprint that may well become a rallying point for the party in 2016. The headline proposal is a $1.2 trillion package of tax cuts for middle-income earners, including a $1,000 “paycheck bonus credit” for individual making less than $200,000 a year, and twice that amount for couples. Van Hollen, who is the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, would also expand the earned income tax credit and the child care tax credit, along with offering an even bigger break for people who devoted a portion of their tax credit to retirement savings. Additionally, the plan would try to prod CEOs to give their employees raises by changing the rules for companies that claim deductions for executive pay.

The plan drew swift endorsements from Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and an array of liberal groups, although not yet from the White House. While the tax cut for the middle class should be an easy political sell (Who doesn’t want an extra $1,000-2,000?), the more punitive Wall Street policies are significant because they put the Democratic leadership behind ideas that have energized the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. A group supportive of Warren, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, applauded Van Hollen for his plan “taxing high-risk Wall Street gambling.” “Since Election Day, we’ve been urging the Democratic Party to rally around big economic populist ideas that impact millions of people’s lives,” the PCCC said.

A month ago the Progressive Change Institute (PCCCai??i??s C3 sister organization) launched the Big Ideas Project at ThinkBig.US — a crowd-sourced platform allowing the public to submit and vote on big ideas they believe progressives should champion in 2015 and 2016.

And in that month, the crowd definitely responded.

Over 800,000 votes have been cast on over 2,000 user-submitted ideas, including over 30 from policy experts from AFL-CIO, Demos, ROC United, Lawrence Lessig, former Senators Byron Dorgan and Ted Kaufman, plus many more.

The top 20 ideas that rise to the top will be seriously considered by over 30 members of Congress, including Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Jon Tester and Representatives Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison, Alan Grayson, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Ruben Gallego, and more.

PCI will even be polling ideas pulled from the project in battleground states.

Some of the top ideas are:

Now is the time to expand Social Security ai??i?? not cut it. Social Security benefits simply haven’t kept up with the rising costs that seniors faceai??i??for medicine, food, and housing. We’re facing a retirement crisis where seniors can’t rely on pensions and other parts of the social contract. We need to increase benefits to make sure they reflect the true costs seniors face. Expanding Social Security is the best way to ensure all Americans have the economic security they need to retire with dignity.

Corporations are paper, not people. People before profit. Enact laws which reverse Citizens United, McCutcheon, and Buckley v. Valeo. Without a fair field in which everyday people are heard and treated equally, when, as we’re now seeing, corporations and money carry more weight than the voices of our citizens, our entire system of …

With Democrats’ popularity at a record low and the party now in the minority in the House and Senate, the progressive caucus and outside activists say the party is now free to stop cutting bad deals with Republicans and must draw red lines against legislation designed to help narrow, wealthy interests.

“Democrats lost in 2014 because the brand was not associated with big, bold ideas that would be game-changing for peoples’ lives,” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said.

Progressive advocates see the next two years through the prism of the coming 2016 race. They want Democrats to use their minority to lay down a sweeping populist agenda for the country ahead of the election, which could include breaking up the big banks, a major clean energy jobs bill or investments in education to let college students graduate debt free.

“Things like that will inspire people to vote,” Green said. “So the question is, what do we do in 2015 and 2016 toward that north star vision?”

The confirmation of Antonio Weiss — tapped by Mr. Obama to serve as Treasury’s undersecretary for domestic finance — is in doubt, as liberals such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, have taken direct aim at the former investment banker’s close ties to Wall Street.

The uproar highlights how some on the left, led by Mrs. Warren and also powerful progressive organizations outside Capitol Hill, now feel more emboldened to take on both the administration and so-called Wall Street Democrats.

They argue the administration must move to the left, particularly on financial matters, and needs to break associations the Democratic Party has with powerful banks and other financial institutions. Mrs. Warren has, for example, made the case that the federal government should pursue harsher regulations on Wall Street and should seek to break up large banks.

Mrs. Warren, Mr. Manchin and other opponents have been joined by groups such as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — which has rallied liberals to oppose Mr. Weiss‘ nomination — and organizations such as the Independent Community Bankers of America, which argues the nominee would be yet another Wall Street voice in the federal government.