Fundraising emails are a normal fact of political life. Asking your supporters to help buy the gas you helped make expensive is a special kind of tone-deaf.
Maine Senator Susan Collins, no longer cruising toward the easy re-election she once expected, recently sent out a campaign email begging for cash to fuel a statewide bus tour, according to the Daily Beast. The pitch is straightforward. The subtext is not.
"Team Collins is officially hitting the road!" the email opens, before laying out plans for a tour running from Kittery to Madawaska. "Organizing a tour of this scale takes a lot of coordination, enthusiasm, and quite literally fuel. Will you chip in just $5 today to help us put gas in the tank and keep our team moving forward?" It goes on: "Every dollar goes directly toward keeping our team on the road, our events fully stocked, and our bus powered from stop to stop."
Nobody should imagine the campaign is actually short on gas money. Collins reported $11 million cash on hand at the end of June. The gas angle is a fundraising trick — people open their wallets more readily when they can picture their money buying something they can point to. As a piece of mail, it hits a real pocketbook issue for a lot of voters.
Gas is expensive right now largely because the president — the one Collins has voted with 95% of the time — started a war with Iran. She voted for that war.
Days after Trump unilaterally attacked Iran, Senator Tim Kaine introduced the Iran War Powers Resolution, which would have forced the administration to make its case to Congress before continuing the conflict. Collins voted against it, issuing a statement that read: "Passing this resolution now would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops. At this juncture, providing unequivocal support to our service members is critically important, as is ongoing consultation by the Administration with Congress."
So the senator had a chance to push back on the war before it escalated, and she declined.
None of this will surprise anyone who has watched Collins operate. She has a well-worn habit of breaking with her party only after the vote no longer matters. By the time she supported an anti-war resolution that ultimately failed, the White House had already declared the temporary ceasefire meant the war was over. Officially, the current war is a brand-new one, entirely distinct from the old war — a bit of semantic footwork that keeps Congress out of the loop.
Is Collins objecting to the White House playing games with congressional authority? Her website's press releases don't include one calling for an actual end to the fighting. The war is not the priority at the moment. The election is.
Which brings the story back to the bus. There is a lot of Maine to cover between Kittery and Madawaska, all of it burning fuel that costs what it costs because of a war she voted to support. The campaign would still appreciate your $5.
This article was written using AI.