Maine Democrat Rep. Chellie Pingree told the national Democratic Party and news media to just leave the Maine Democratic Party alone as they scramble to find a new candidate for Senate as a replacement for Graham Platner. “Just stay away, stop writing all your dumb-ass columns on the internet. Don’t call me anymore. I don’t want to hear your ideas,” she said. “We’re not stupid; we can figure this stuff out.”

CHELLIE PINGREE: There’s no guarantee that I would get to vote on who gets to, you know, go to the convention and nominate. So it’s a very open process, and anybody could participate. And most people are sort of baffled by it because they’ve never bothered to pay any attention. And it’s the people who’ve been working in the trenches for years and years who have kept these Democratic parties in little states like ours going, and people should have some appreciation and respect for that. LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Yeah, it’s all up now to these anonymous people who are never praised, never thanked publicly, never focused on by the news media, who are going to have to salvage a Senate election in the most important Senate election season, possibly of our lifetimes. And these people Graham Platner tonight was referring to as party apparatchiks. What was your reaction to him using that phrase? CHELLIE PINGREE: Can I just be clear? That’s not even a Maine word. Like, nobody even says that stuff. You know, it’s like, well- LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: He did have someone fly up from New York to help him write this thing, and that is a New York word. That is the kind of language that you could get from here. CHELLIE PINGREE: Well, my number one request is, could everybody just leave us alone in Maine? Could everybody just, you know, high-paid consultants, all the people who want to make money off of us, who want to treat us like a petri dish, just stay away and stop writing all your columns on the internet and telling us what we should be doing. And don’t call me anymore. I don’t want to hear your ideas about, you know, why we’re not doing it well enough. And, you know, that’s just not how we do it here. And Devin made a really good point. We’re independent. We don’t like to be told what to do. And we’re not stupid. We can figure this stuff out. And people in Maine have great integrity, incredible common sense. They’re not ideologues. They want this to work. They want something to happen, and they hate what’s going on in this country. People, you know, they’re so distressed when I talk to them every day in the grocery store, you know, everywhere I encounter people. I just came from an event tonight, and they just want to fix this stuff. And they want to take power back again. And they want to be in control. And they want us to have the power to fight back in Washington, to be able to investigate and subpoena and sue the president and just stop him from his reckless behavior and get those things that we’ve been promising people for a long time, like health care and child care and affordable housing. So Mainers are all in to fix this thing. And that’s the one thing people have said to me. They may be, you know, very sad and distressed that the campaign is not going to go on. But the second thing they say is, But I want to win. And what do we need to do?

RealClearPolitics Videos