Former Vice President Joe Biden has begun accepting financial donations for a 2020 presidential campaign, a clear sign that he intends to begin his challenge to President Trump within days.

Biden is expected to make his candidacy official with a video announcement next Wednesday, according to Democratic sources close to the former vice president.

Several Democratic donors and party fund-raisers received emails in recent days encouraging them to write sizable checks to support Biden’s planned candidacy, and to mail them to a Democratic consulting firm in Northern Virginia.

Two fundraising solicitations, circulated by Democratic donors in California and Pennsylvania, said Biden’s campaign committee would be called “Biden for President.”

The preemptive push for large donations stands in sharp contrast to the effort many Democratic candidates have made to court small donors as a sign of their appeal to the party’s grass-roots base.

In the emails Biden’s allies acknowledged he was not yet able to accept online contributions because he has not become a candidate.

Biden’s announcement video will draw, in part, on footage shot two weeks ago outside his old family home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he likes to bring people and tell stories about how his grandfather would sit at the kitchen table, talking about making ends meet.

But the campaign is still making key decisions on what will happen next, including whether to go cute for a launch event by doing it on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, famous for the training montage from Rocky, or go for a powerful challenge directed right at Trump by heading to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the president infamously blamed “both sides” of a neo-Nazi march in August 2017.

Charlottesville was the event that first led Biden to speak out forcefully against Trump, and by going there, he could use the event as a rallying point for “the battle for the soul of this nation” that he’s been talking about since Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists that weekend.

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Senior staff for the campaign is set.

Interviews for new aides have quietly been going on over the past two weeks, and some hires have been made.

The donation drive by Biden’s allies is the latest indication that he expects to rely on the backing of some of the Democratic Party’s wealthiest contributors, many of whom have held off on donating to other contenders in anticipation of Biden’s entry.

The pursuit of big donors could be politically risky for Biden in a Democratic primary already infused with outrage about the influence of the wealthy in politics.

Some of Biden’s rivals, including Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have effectively sworn off high-dollar fund-raising altogether.

[My mom and niece represent Biden’s generational divide.]

The primary, Biden believes, will be easier than some might think: He sees a clear path down the middle of the party, especially with Bernie Sanders occupying a solid 20 percent of the progressive base, and most of the other candidates fighting for the rest.

And the announcement comes at a moment when many in the party have become anxious about Sanders’s strength, with some beginning to wonder whether Biden might be the only sure counterweight to stop him from getting the nomination.

Biden and his team have eagerly been taking in nearly every public poll that has him in first place, convinced those numbers will only grow, despite many Democratic operatives, on opposing campaigns and beyond, who believe he’ll start leeching support almost as soon as he declares.

Biden’s doubters are convinced that he seems better as a theoretical alternative than as someone people would actually support, especially when they start looking at his record closely.

Biden will enter a dense Democratic primary field that includes former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Eric Swalwell, Sec. Julian Castro, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Gov. Jay Inslee, and Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Tim Ryan.