That’s because Mr. Powell, a current member of the Federal Reserve Board, resides firmly in the camp of supporters of the Fed’s policy of maintaining its low interest policy as long as inflation stays muted and wage increases remain stubbornly small.

The other candidate — the economist John B. Taylor, the reported choice of Vice President Mike Pence and other hard-line conservatives — is openly hawkish, having warned for years that the central bank’s easy money policy was stoking future inflation.

Most prominently, in November 2010, Mr. Taylor was among 24 signatories to an open letter to Ben Bernanke, then the chairman, attacking a signature aspect of the Fed’s efforts to stimulate a sluggish economy, its “quantitative easing” program of purchasing debt in the market to keep interest rates low.