WASHINGTON -- Hillary Rodham Clinton will end months of speculation about her political future and launch a 2016 presidential campaign Sunday, people familiar with her plans said.
The first official word that Clinton will seek the Democratic Party's nomination will come on an online video posted on social media. She'll then make stops in key early-voting states, including Iowa and New Hampshire, where she'll hold small events with voters.
One Democrat familiar with the campaign rollout said Clinton's stops would include visits to people's homes in those early states.
The people familiar with Clinton's plans spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
The former secretary of state will be making her second bid for president and will enter the primary race in a strong position to succeed her rival from the 2008 Democratic primary, President Barack Obama. Only a handful of lower-profile Democrats have said they are considering their own campaigns.
Should she win the nomination, Clinton would face the winner of a Republican primary season that could feature as many as two dozen candidates. Among them, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is expected to formally announce his campaign Monday in Miami, people familiar with his plans have said.
Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky are the only two major Republican candidates who have officially entered the race.
Clinton will return to politics after a two-year hiatus from government. If elected, the former first lady of the nation and Arkansas would be the first female president.
Clinton's campaign announcement has been preceded by criticism over her use of a personal email account and server while she was secretary of state, as well as the Clinton family foundation's acceptance of donations from foreign governments.
She said at a news conference last month she used the personal email account for convenience. Republicans running a select congressional committee reviewing the 2012 attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, which took place during Clinton's tenure at the State Department, are investigating her decision to delete thousands of emails she has deemed personal in nature.
Kicking off her campaign with straight-up retail politics, where she can talk to voters one on one, would be a departure from how Clinton jumped into her first presidential campaign.
In 2007, Clinton also launched with a video but followed it with a large, boisterous rally in Des Moines: "I'm running for president, and I'm in it to win it."
This time, the emphasis will be making a personal connection, rather than touting herself. Clinton allies say they hope the intimate settings will let people see a more nurturing, empathetic side, along with her sense of humor.
"I think she's going to make sure she's in the small venues, the living rooms, the smaller places where she can connect directly with the voters," said Sylvia Larsen, a former New Hampshire state Senate president and a longtime Clinton supporter. "When people meet Hillary Clinton, they are persuaded. She's very down-to-earth and very personable."
By campaigning heavily in Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton hopes to avoid making the same stumbles as she did in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, which Obama won in an upset.
Democrats expressed hopes that she would seek personal connections this time.
Davenport, Iowa, Mayor Bill Gluba, a Democrat elected in a nonpartisan election who backed Obama in 2008, said Clinton "kind of blew it last time" in the nation's first caucus state.
"She's a very decent, wonderful woman, but sometimes they come out of the New York atmosphere and they're surrounded by staff and they're insulated. We don't want to see that," he said.
"I'd like to have her come to Davenport and we'll take a stroll along the Mississippi River and chitchat a little bit and just talk," said Gluba, who recently had lunch with former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who also is considering a campaign.
Among the other Democrats who could challenge Clinton in the primary are former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and Vice President Joe Biden.
Being a grandmother
In announcing her campaign, Clinton is likely to offer her most specific explanation for why she will seek the presidency again after months of offering glimpses into her rationale, including ways to address the gap between the rich and the poor and providing children and young people with more opportunities.
In a new epilogue released Friday to the paperback version of her State Department memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton wrote about the joy of becoming a grandmother for the first time -- her granddaughter, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky, was born in September -- and says it informs her work.
"Becoming a grandmother has made me think deeply about the responsibility we all share as stewards of the world we inherit and will one day pass on," Clinton wrote in the epilogue, published by The Huffington Post.
"I'm more convinced than ever that our future in the 21st century depends on our ability to ensure that a child born in the hills of Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta or the Rio Grande Valley grows up with the same shot at success that Charlotte will," Clinton wrote.
Clinton has fielded advice from more than 200 policy experts in formulating her economic agenda and still has not settled on the details, people familiar with the matter said.
Rather than deliver a robust policy speech immediately, she intends to ease into presenting her ideas for alleviating the growing gap between rich and poor and for increasing wages, said several people involved in her plans. The slow pace will allow her to continue to generate news coverage as Republican presidential hopefuls engage in heated debates in their crowded primary.
The go-slow, go-small strategy, Democratic advisers say, plays to her strengths, allowing her to meet voters in intimate settings where her humor and policy expertise can show through.
That approach is modeled on the listening tour she conducted across New York state at the start of her successful 2000 Senate race. Longtime advisers and allies said Clinton wants to re-establish the connection with voters and regular people she had in that campaign, when she traveled into diners and people's living rooms and kitchens to listen to their concerns.
Jay Jacobs, a former New York Democratic Party chairman and longtime Clinton friend and supporter, said the 2000 listening tour became "a two-way conversation that impressed voters not by just what she said, but by how intently she listened. I think that's Hillary. That's something that has worked before and it'll work again."
Jacobs, who recently met privately with Clinton when she addressed his group, the American Camp Association, in Atlantic City, N.J., said Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign will not be "reactive."
"It will be one that really presents Hillary Clinton to the voters as she is known by people who are close to her: as a very warm, genuine, thoughtful, certainly intelligent, regular person," Jacobs said. "There's been so much that we've seen that seems to create an image, by the press and by others, those who are looking to derail her, but now the voters are going to hear from Hillary and they're going to see Hillary."
A $2.5 billion campaign
Clinton's race is expected to cost up to $2.5 billion, far more than the $1 billion Obama raised for his 2012 re-election, and aides have said she is expected to focus heavily on online fundraising.
The Clinton campaign's fundraising staff and other aides already have started working out of a new headquarters in Brooklyn, with almost the entire team working there Friday.
"We're going to have to raise as much money as possible," said one Clinton fundraiser who requested anonymity to discuss the campaign's internal plans. "We're not going to take it slow. The announcement is a good time to raise money and we'll have everyone out there asking people to support her candidacy."
Several Clinton fundraisers described a rush of major donors wanting to get checks in the door on day one of the campaign.
"All the horses are in the gate just waiting for those gates to open," said John Morgan, a prominent Florida donor and Clinton fundraiser. "That's how I describe the fundraising efforts. There's really nothing to do until the gate opens. But the gate could open Sunday and it could be the floodgate. The only issue they'll have is how fast can they raise the money, because the money is pent up. And if they start holding events, the line will be around the block to host an event."
Clinton's fundraising efforts are being directed by Dennis Cheng, who had been finance director at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. But the campaign is not expected to give titles to top bundlers or announce a list of finance committee chairmen or members, according to Democrats with knowledge of the Clinton strategy.
While Clinton will reach out to donors, she is not planning a slew of glitzy and high-dollar fundraising events in the near term -- a contrast to Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has spent the better part of four months crisscrossing the country holding private finance events for his Right to Rise political action committee and super PAC with tickets costing as much as $100,000 each.
"I think she'll be in Iowa eating corn on the cob instead of clinking champagne flutes with donors," Morgan said. "She can do this much quicker, much more efficiently because she's not fighting for donors. Rubio, Bush, that whole crowd is in mortal combat for dollars. She's not. That's her advantage."
Clinton's campaign also can build on the efforts of Ready for Hillary, an outside group started in 2013, which has held more than 1,000 grass-roots events across all 50 states in the past two years.
The group has amassed a donor pool of more than 135,000 people, the vast majority of whom gave contributions of $100 or less, super PAC officials said. Ready for Hillary also has cultivated a network of local organizers who could sign on for similar roles with the official campaign.
That could give Clinton a sizable head start over some of her Republican rivals in building a small-donor operation. Ready for Hillary will not be able to coordinate with Clinton once she announces, but it could share its list of supporters with her campaign through a list swap, campaign-finance lawyers said.
But the group may not even have to take that step. Once Clinton declares her candidacy, the super PAC can simply direct its supporters to her website, allowing her campaign to quickly build a small donor list.
And once she's officially in, Ready for Hillary plans to post online the names of hundreds of donors who have given or raised more than $5,000, according to a person familiar with the plans. That list -- which includes at least 222 donors who gave $25,000 -- would be valuable not just for Clinton's campaign but for Priorities USA, the high-dollar super PAC planning to finance a pro-Clinton television advertising campaign and now faces pressure to kick-start its fundraising.
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace, Ken Thomas, Catherine Lucey, Kathleen Ronayne and Erik Schelzig of The Associated Press; by Amy Chozick and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times; and by Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker, Dan Balz and Matea Gold of The Washington Post.
A Section on 04/11/2015