(Updated at 4:05 p.m.) “Girls” star Lena Dunham campaigned for Hillary Clinton in Rosslyn Tuesday afternoon.
The actress, writer, producer and director attended a lunch with Arlington young professionals at Barley Mac (1600 Wilson Blvd) around 12:30 p.m. She spoke of the importance of electing Mrs. Clinton and defeating GOP candidate Donald Trump.
“The message I just wanted to share with millennials, with people my age… is just to say that voting isn’t the only way that you engage civically, but it’s one of the most important ways,” Dunham said. “So many people don’t [vote] and it’s so important that we take advantage of that power. None of us wants to see a country that Trump is imagining… and the only way we can prevent that is getting out on November 8th.”
“Something that I say a lot is that I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton because she is the lesser of two evils, I’m voting for her because she’s the president that I’ve wanted since I was six years old,” she said. “I know so many women and men who feel that way and it’s so heartening to see a room full of people who I know are ready to advocate for that.”
After the Rosslyn event, Dunham was scheduled to attend subsequent events at George Mason University and in Falls Church, where she was to encourage Northern Virginia residents to check their voter registration status and register to vote by the Oct. 17 registration deadline.
“Dunham will lay out the stakes of this election, discuss with voters why Donald Trump’s pattern of disrespecting and demeaning women makes him unfit to hold our nation’s highest office, and share her support for Clinton’s agenda to make us stronger together and raise the minimum wage, fight LGBT discrimination, ensure women have access to reproductive health care, and tackle climate change,” according to a Clinton campaign press release.
A rush transcript of Dunham’s remarks at the restaurant, after the jump.
Thank you all so much. It’s a real honor to be here with you, it’s a real honor to have the chance to spend so much time on the road for Hillary this month. I have known since even before she announced she would be running that I would want to be apart of this campaign but I didn’t understand just how much of my life it would consume and it’s been a really beautiful thing. I thought I would go to a couple of fundraisers, post a couple of tweets and that America would logically move in the appropriate direction, and that turned out not to be the case and turned out to be a far more terrifying and confusing affair that any of us could have imagined. With that being said, I feel so lucky that it’s galvanized me and so many other people that I know towards political action and towards taking a stand and hear so much talk about millennials being apathetic. It’s something that I’ve seen this election season is that they are not. Whether is was the movement building around Senator Sanders or the excitement that exists right now, and the fierce and angry reaction to Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric. We are proving that you do not sit back idly and that the future of our country matters and that we understand that we want the world for our children to be better than when we showed up. And so I feel so lucky because part of travelling has been meeting people like you who are engaged and do care and do disprove every sort of magazine and think piece about millennials being lazy and entitled, and who understand it has to get out (inaudible). I have a strong feeling everyone in this room is going to vote. I don’t have any doubts about any of you and if I did, they were all erased by the events of the last week. But that being said, you know people who aren’t planning to vote, whether it’s your little sibling who doesn’t understand her vote matters, who thinks that it’s one drop in an ocean. Whether it’s your grandmother who just doesn’t quite understand what anybody is about and doesn’t think it’s important. Whether it’s your neighbor who is housebound and doesn’t know who is going to drive them. You know somebody who isn’t going to vote and so I’m not obviously on the road to change any Trump supporters minds, that’s not a skillset I have, but I am here to encourage people that you do have the power. Like, if each of us grabbed the four people who we knew who are on the fence about voting and got them to change their minds, and got them to follow us to the polls, took them to the polls, took that initiative, we would be living in a very different world on November 9th than if we don’t and so that I what I feel my job is. I feel like Hillary Clinton’s qualifications, her skill, her empathy has all been so well demonstrated. At this point, there’s nothing more she can do than what she’s done in the past 30 years to prove her fitness through this roll and I would feel so lucky that the first woman that we get to pass our vote for is also the most qualified woman we could cast our vote for. But, now our job is to make sure that those votes get cast, and so that’s what I feel my job is and that’s why I’m, you know, basically making my entire October Hillary-centric. I hope that you’ll all engage as volunteers, as passionate advocates for what the vote means. It’s so easy for young Americans to lose sight of the fact that voting is a way of exercising your voice and that who they elect matters because it can feel as though… and I think it has never been more evident than in this election where we are looking at two such starkly different futures laid out for us and two such starkly different visions of what America is and can be. I think that you don’t have to be an optimist to understand that Hillary Clinton is representative of the truth of our values, the depth of our beliefs, and that Donald Trump is representative of our darkest fears, our most lazy ideas and our most, sort of, inborn hatreds and we can’t let that proliferate. So, I am so excited to see you all get out there and so grateful that you want to listen to me talk about this. I know that my career hasn’t logically let me to a political podium, but I feel really lucky to have the chance to talk about it and I feel so passionately about her as a candidate. Something that I say a lot is that I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton because she is the lesser of two evils, I’m voting for her because she’s the president that I’ve wanted since I was six years old, and I know so many women and men who feel that way and it’s so heartening to see a room full of people who I know are ready to advocate for that. So thank you all so much for your hard work.