The Clinton campaign announced this week that it had more than $42 million cash-on-hand as of the end of May. | AP Photo Hillary Clinton to begin collecting general election cash

With Hillary Clinton poised to become the presumptive Democratic nominee next Tuesday, her campaign is preparing to begin actively soliciting general election funds for the first time on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with her campaign’s planning.

The move will amount to a potentially massive and immediate infusion of cash into Clinton's campaign, which announced this week that it had more than $42 million cash-on-hand as of the end of May.


Clinton has nearly 30,000 donors who have contributed the legal maximum of $2,700 for the primary through the end of April, according to Federal Election Commission records. If all of those contributors cut same maximum-sized checks for the general election she could raise another $80 million from them.

The decision to begin collecting general election funds, which Clinton has actively avoided for more than year, is yet another sign that even as Bernie Sanders remains in the Democratic race, Clinton is turning her attention fully to taking on Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. She delivered a blistering speech in San Diego on Thursday warning that his election would be a “historic mistake.”

In addition to raising general election funds starting on Wednesday, Clinton also will raise money for the Democratic National Convention to be held in July in Philadelphia, according to the person familiar with her campaign’s plans.

Clinton currently has 2,313 of the 2,383 delegates she needs to clinch the nomination, according to the Associated Press, including so-called super delegates, and with delegate-rich California and New Jersey voting next Tuesday she is expected to easily pass the threshold.

Clinton has formed a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee and more than 30 state parties, allowing her to solicit checks for $350,000 or more for months. In May, her campaign has said, she raised more than $27 million in direct campaign contributions and another $13.5 million for the DNC and state parties, though almost all of the funds raised for them were routed back to the DNC in previous months.

All told for the cycle, Clinton’s money machine has brought in about $300 million, $240 million of it for the primary campaign.

It makes for a dramatic comparison with Trump, who has only just begun soliciting big contributors since securing the GOP nomination a month ago, holding a fundraiser in Los Angeles and Albuquerque in late May. As of the end of April, Trump had received under $3.5 million in contributions of more than $200 — about 1/50th of what Clinton had raised in such funds.

Since he has become the presumptive Republican nominee, Trump has struck an agreement with the Republican National Committee and a dozen state parties to begin raising funds for them. But unlike Clinton, who has three decades of donor contacts, Trump is largely starting from scratch in the donor world.

Trump could still prove a formidable force among small donors — his campaign collected more than $10 million, mostly selling merchandise, including his signature “Make America Great Again” hats through April — but his campaign has yet to build a formal structure to cultivate such contributors. Clinton has raised more than $40 million in contributions from small donors giving under $200.

For months, Clinton has aggressively worked the fundraising circuit. Just this Wednesday, she held two fundraisers in Boston, one with a performance by Jon Bon Jovi that drew more than 1,000 attendees, including some small donors, and a more intimate event at Morton’s Steakhouse, where two dozen attended, each paying at least $50,000 to attend. On Monday, she hosted another two big-money events, one in New York City and one in New Jersey.

So far, for her own campaign, Clinton has actively sought only money in $2,700 increments. She hasn’'t turned away general election funds when given, with more than 1,000 donors already giving her the maximum $2,700 for the fall campaign, according to FEC records. But the decision to not actively seek out such money was a conscious one, and a big shift from 2008, when her early solicitation of general election funds was seen as overly presumptive. She eventually had to return the money to donors when then-Sen. Barack Obama won the nomination.