Actress Lena Dunham hit the campaign trail for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in North Carolina on Sunday and Monday for a series of events at which she encouraged younger voters to show up to the polls on Election Day.
The 30-year-old Girls star and showrunner reportedly met with a small group of supporters in Cary on Sunday afternoon to stress the importance of early voting before heading to a panel discussion aimed at millennial voters at Duke University Sunday night.
The panel discussion featured speakers Dunham, Fresh Off the Boat actress Constance Wu, transgender activist and writer Janet Mock, journalist Ashley Ford and comedian Aparna Nancherla. The conversation focused on Clinton’s struggles to attract support among younger voters, according to Duke campus newspaper The Chronicle.
“I do think there’s incredibly unfair bias that we’ve seen with Hillary and her campaign of people trying to hold women accountable for the actions of the men in their lives,” Dunham said while reportedly discussing the media’s treatment of sexual misconduct allegations against Bill Clinton. “Men are not held accountable for the actions of their wives and women should not be held accountable for the actions of their husbands.”
Sunday night’s panel at Duke came just two days after FBI Director James Comey told Congressional leaders that the agency had located tens of thousands of additional emails on another device that may be “pertinent” to its investigation of Clinton earlier this summer.
Duke University sophomore Justin Ching told the paper that with the uniformity of the panelists’ political opinions, “not much mind-blowing or really engaging discussion or debate was had.”
“But I did really enjoy how some audience members asked how the panelists reconciled Hillary’s controversies with their support of her, which is something that I personally had been struggling with during the election,” Ching added.
On Monday, Dunham visited the University of North Carolina for another get out the vote event.
Dunham has been a vocal celebrity surrogate for the Clinton campaign and has stumped for the candidate on multiple occasions, including early campaign jaunts through Iowa and New Hampshire during the primaries and a speaking appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.
“Hillary knows that access and opportunity are the American promise, not transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia and systemic racism,” Dunham said at the convention, while slamming Clinton’s rival, Republican Donald Trump. “She knows we have to fight hatred of all kinds, and not ignite it for the craven purpose of seeking power.”
The actress has also interviewed Clinton, and previously took over the candidate’s Instagram account.
Dunham has also been a fierce critic of Trump.
“I’m trying to connect to the idea that he has appealed to something very deep and very primal, and so we have to look at what that is, and what that wound is, and what that wound is that he seems to be promising to heal,” the actress said at an entertainment industry breakfast in June. “And how can we handle that without inviting a megalomaniacal, misogynist, racist, Islamophobic, ableist, transphobic hellhound into the White House.”
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