Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to kick off her 2016 presidential campaign

Photo By Ron Mills

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton  is expected to kick off her 2016 presidential campaign on Sunday.

Clinton will announce her campaign through social media and a video, according to multiple outlets. She'll follow up her announcement with campaign travel to early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

UPDATE FROM dailybeast.com

On Sunday, Clinton will announce her presidential run and plans to use next week to raise ‘an insane amount of money,’ an insider says.

After the announcement comes the deluge.

Hillary Clinton will announce her presidential campaign this Sunday, sources in the Clinton operation tell The Daily Beast.

After that, the nascent campaign will embark on a fundraising push that the Clinton camp says will dwarf anything seen in the history of presidential politics.

“They are going to raise in one week what some Republican presidential candidates are going to raise the entire cycle,” said one Clinton aide.

On Saturday afternoon, Ready for Hillary, the super PAC that has been a Clinton campaign-in-waiting in the years since Clinton left the State Department, will host what is likely a final fundraising push at SouthwestNY, a sleek Tex-Mex restaurant steps from the rebuilt World Trade Center.

From then on, Ready for Hillary will encourage its 3.6 million supporters to give to Clinton’s real campaign while the super PAC quietly dissolves.

Ready for Hillary has raised close to $15 million from nearly 150,000 donors, and Clintonistas believe that those same donors alone could give as much as 10 times that amount to a Clinton campaign.

They are expected to be joined in this fundraising by Clinton allies like EMILY’s List, the organization dedicated to electing pro-choice women to office that isviewed as central to Clinton’s 2016 chances.

Regardless of when she announces, the plan, one Clinton insider told The Daily Beast, was to do a massive fundraising push through her website and with allied organizations to raise “an insane amount of money” right out of the starting gate.

A senior official with Clinton’s soon to be campaign tamped down fundrasing expectations.

“The ‘insane fundraising’ expectations comments are about as connected to reality as that person probably is to the campaign. After eight years away from fundraising and a list a fraction of the size of Obama's, that couldn't be further from the truth.”

“They are going to raise in one week what some Republican presidential candidates are going to raise the entire cycle.”

Clinton is likely to announce her run for president on Twitter, linking the announcement through a variety of social media platforms.

Clinton has been unusually active on Twitter in recent weeks to generate an audience for her expected announcement.

Since the last week of March, she has tweeted twice: in support of the Affordable Care Act and against an Indiana law that some say would discriminate against gays. She has also weighed in on the shooting of an unarmed black man in South Carolina—“Praying for #WalterScott’s family. Heartbreaking & too familiar. We can do better—rebuild trust, reform justice system and respect all lives.”; paid tribute to retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid; and come out against “payday lenders.”

After Clinton announces her candidacy, she will likely jet off to the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire early next week. While most presidential campaigns strategize over how to get media attention, Clinton operatives are trying to figure out how to wrangle a ballooning press corps that for weeks has competed over such small-bore issues as which empty Brooklyn loft space will house her campaign headquarters and looked for meaning in every Clinton facial expression and utterance since 2012.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have always been prodigious Democratic fundraisers, but they will enter the 2016 election cycle as newcomers to the post-Citizens Unitedworld of campaign finance. Super PACs associated with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, have raised $31 million since he announced his campaign last week. And former Florida governor Jeb Bush has embarked on a “shock and awe” fundraising blitz to overwhelm his Republican rivals.

Hillary Clinton intends to upstage them all.