Democrats urge Clinton to launch campaign “The whole situation underscores the need for her to announce her candidacy," says a state Democratic official.

Democrats around the country had a clear and stern message for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday after she wrapped up her much-anticipated — if hastily scheduled — news conference on her use of a private email account as secretary of state: She shouldn’t expect this issue to go away in the coming months, and she’d better hurry up and announce her presidential campaign soon.

“The whole situation underscores the need for her to announce her candidacy, as an actual campaign would be the best way to deal with issues like this if they come up,” said Kathy Winter, chairwoman of Iowa’s Osceola County Democrats.

That sentiment echoed in interviews with more than a dozen Democratic activists and operatives, including some in the influential presidential nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. And it wasn’t lost on the former secretary of state’s camp: one Clinton confidante told POLITICO the scrutiny of the past week convinced Clinton to speed up the campaign rollout. The internal discussions about delaying the kickoff until July are ancient history; Clinton’s announcement is now expected within the next two to five weeks.

“Secretary Clinton had to address the issue and the sooner she did, the sooner this issue will be resolved, or at least take up less of the media’s attention,” said Bret Nilles, chairman of Iowa’s Linn County Democrats, in an email. “I’m thinking that this might accelerate her thinking in declaring her intentions. This seems like the first step on getting her side of the story out to the public directly.”

“When she announces that she’s running, that’s when this will fade away,” added a national Democratic strategist familiar with the emerging campaign structure and plans.

Clinton dug in her heels during Tuesday’s 20-minute news conference at United Nations headquarters, insisting that she followed protocol while relying on her personal email address — which runs on a server sitting in her Chappaqua, New York, mansion — for her work in the State Department from 2009 to 2013. But the media and Republicans alike panned her performance, which came after a week of intense scrutiny and relative silence from the presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner.

Allies and aides have continued to aggressively defend Clinton, who remains the overwhelming favorite for her party’s nomination — no other Democrat seems poised to mount a serious challenge. Her backers maintain that Clinton’s transfer of 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department reflects her commitment to accountability and that ordinary voters will not care about this issue — especially not on Election Day in November 2016. Republican attempts to paint Clinton as opaque and cagey will fail, they say, since there are few figures in the world who are better-known to voters than Clinton.

“I think most Americans will buy” her answers to the questions she faced on Tuesday, said Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen. “And we only need ‘most!’”

While Democratic activists have grumbled when pointing to Clinton’s struggles on the email issue and over separate revelations that her family’s Clinton Foundation has recently taken money from foreign governments, they have not abandoned her. Instead, they’ve tended to emphasize that the party should have a competitive primary so that she is better prepared for the general election.

Most Democrats said on Tuesday that Clinton would emerge safely from the news conference and the email scandal, but some were still wary of the optics and circumstances.

“You’re secretary of state for the United States!” exclaimed former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder. “That’s not a personal account. It’s not a matter of being smarter, it would have been the right thing to do. Don’t try to justify it.”

Still, the overwhelming feeling in Democratic circles was one of relief that Clinton had finally addressed the questions — thereby quashing the Republican talking point that she has been “hiding” — and that she did not stand down.

“This will help speed the end of this [controversy],” said Iowa Treasurer Michael Fitzgerald. “I think she could have done this earlier, and it wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand.”

Allies said the format, a packed event with dozens of reporters and television cameras, suited the situation well.

Even so, the defensive news conference — Clinton’s first in years — effectively signaled the beginning of her still-undeclared campaign.

It was not the bang Clinton was hoping for when she and her team carefully designed her March schedule to focus on her work on women’s equality and rights, and her overall message — that women and girls have come a long way, yet more work is to be done — has been largely drowned out. Clinton, who is expected to lean on her potential status as the first female president in 2016, was at the U.N. for a speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of her famous 1995 address on women’s progress in Beijing.

Now, however, Democrats are clamoring for Clinton to drop the pretense and acknowledge her White House aspirations. Without a political team in place, Clinton’s small personal staff and a network of loosely affiliated outside groups have carried the burden of responding to the deluge of questions. As a candidate with a full-scale campaign, Clinton could more easily direct and coordinate a robust response.

“That would be helpful,” said South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison. “In terms of her own operation, it [would give] her the ability to address these issues.”

Even while Clinton stumbles, there was little talk of her potential challengers on Tuesday. The three most active — former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb — declined to jab at Clinton over the controversy.

“I really don’t want to talk about Hillary Clinton,” Sanders told reporters in Washington.

But even absent a field of aggressive rivals eager to knock Clinton down a peg, activists warned that Republican questions over her emails are unlikely to stop anytime soon — especially after she suggested on Tuesday that her personal emails may no longer be retrievable.

“Ultimately, a press conference is not going to put this to rest, because Republicans have made it clear that they want to make this a witch hunt,” said the Democrat close to Clinton’s nascent campaign who expects the issue to recede in importance once Clinton declares her candidacy.

Republicans, for their part, agree, promising to keep the pressure on Clinton even as their own party’s messy nominating contest gets underway. They seem poised to use the House panel investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya — which has played a role in unearthing Clinton’s use of a private email address — to continue the attacks.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, said he was glad Clinton addressed the questions, “and I hope the Benghazi Select Committee will return to its purpose of investigating the attacks in Benghazi instead of attempting to impact the 2016 presidential election.”

Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, called on the committee to “conclude an investigation that still has no clear scope or objective,” but the committee’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), insisted that Clinton’s appearance “created more questions than answers,” indicating a treacherous road ahead for her.

Still, some standing behind the still-undeclared candidate Clinton warned that the email questions may not even be the most dangerous of her ongoing controversies.

“Ultimately I bet there will be nothing [in the email story], but not until everyone has thoroughly obsessed for way too long about it,” said one Democratic operative within Clinton’s orbit. “But [the] foundation stuff — that grows and gets worse, I fear.”

Katie Glueck, Ben Schreckinger, and Jonathan Topaz contributed to this report.