Ready for Hillary is no longer “Ready for Hillary” -- but they’re still “ready.”
The pro-Clinton super PAC, which always planned to shut down once Clinton made her run official, has officially changed its name to comply with federal elections rules against the name of a candidate appearing in that of an independent group now that Clinton has announced her presidential bid.
Ready for Hillary is now simply: Ready PAC.
Related: Ready for Hillary 2.0
Soon, the group will shutdown entirely, and plans to be out of its Arlington, Virginia office by the end of the week.
Clinton’s campaign hired six former Ready for Hillary staffers, including its co-founder Adam Parkhomenko. All have since left the outside group and can no longer coordinate with its remaining staffers, many of whom are eager for campaign jobs themselves.
The super PAC held its final events Saturday in New York City and Maryland, where they proclaimed victory after two years of organizing support for Clinton’s bid.
“What we’ve really accomplished is we got her to run! That was the purpose,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a longtime Clinton ally and early Ready for Hillary supporter, told msnbc at the New York event. “We started two years ago with two volunteers and one P.O. box, and we now have over 4 million volunteers, we’ve had over 1,300 events like this.”
Started by two former volunteers to Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, Ready for Hillary was dismissed by many Clinton loyalists when it began. At best, detractors viewed it as a silly fan club, and at worst, they feared it would sap support from more established groups or create an unhealthy sense of inevitability for Clinton.
But the group’s impressive organizational efforts eventually quieted critics.
Ready for Hillary raised $15 million from 135,000 donors, including some of the largest and most powerful funders of the Democratic Party. It attracted endorsements from a huge swath of House and Senate Democrats, along with hundreds of local leaders and elected officials. On Facebook, it gained 2.1 million supporters, and its campaign-style bus traveled more 45,000 miles.
But it was all in support of building the four million strong grassroots fundraising list, which is expected to be turned over to the nascent Clinton campaign.
Part of the success came from the group’s name, which proved to be a powerful political brand. Ready for Hillary’s expansive online store offered everything from champagne flutes to dog sweaters to iPhone cases to baby onesies that proclaimed the owner to be “Ready for Hillary.”
“Ready for –" proved so infectious a message that it spawned imitators and competitors in groups like Ready for Warren, a campaign to draft Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Ready for Boldness, a project of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Candidates in the District of Columbia even adopted the name for an electoral slate without authorization from the super PAC.
But with Clinton’s campaign official, the group is making good on its plans to shut down. While there are still some operational loose ends to take care of, the group will wind down as the Clinton campaign builds up.
In the meantime, the super PAC can no longer be “Ready for Hillary.” Now, it can only be “Ready.”