Democratic donors, seeing no alternative candidate, are urging Hillary Clinton to launch her 2016 bid sooner than planned.
While Clinton's response to the controversy that already surrounds her embryonic campaign was widely criticized as late, incomplete, and inadequate, top Democratic bundlers aren't turning away. If anything, the negative attention is making donors anxious for her to have a full team in place so that she can get into the race.
"For me, it reinforced that she needs to announce her candidacy ASAP," said Allan Berliant, an Ohio-based Democratic donor who bundled for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. "I am itching to get started, I want to get this show on the road "¦ pick any cliché you like."
According to Berliant, press coverage of Clinton's unauthorized server and her decision to delete emails she did not want the public to see has created a "real sense of urgency" for the campaign to begin in earnest.
"There's been zero [talk] about, 'Oh, maybe we should look at a different candidate,' or 'Oh gosh, this is horrible,'" he said of the network of donors he is in touch with. "Nothing like that. The only thing I'm getting [are] phone calls saying, 'Let's go, let's go.'"
Clinton's team is still reportedly planning for an early April launch date, putting the start of her official campaign just a few weeks away. But her news conference at the United Nations Tuesday, eight days after The New York Times first broke the news about her use of a private, unauthorized email account and server underscored for some Clinton supporters just how important it is to have a full rapid-response team in place to deal with bad headlines.