(NEXSTAR) — As the 2024 presidential election draws closer, both parties are pushing to secure as many votes as they can.
One avenue the Harris-Walz campaign has been exploring is reaching out to gamers – a demographic that, according to a 2023 survey by the Entertainment Software Association, is largely made up of Gen Z and Millennials.
This past weekend, vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went live on the official Kamala Harris Twitch channel to play some games and talk about the upcoming election.
Twitch is a livestreaming website that specializes in video games, and averages around 2.3 million daily viewers.
The two played Madden NFL ’25 together, Ocasio-Cortez showed off her farm in the cozy indie farming simulator Stardew Valley, and Walz surprised viewers by showing off his driving skills in the 2000s Sega Dreamcast hit Crazy Taxi.
The campaign previously attempted another crossover event on Twitch in early October when they teamed up with World of Warcraft streamer Preheat, who showcased his gameplay on the page while a Harris rally played on the side of the screen. This event was largely panned by gamers on social media.
Popular World of Warcraft streamer Maximum called it “an insane thing to see” in a post on his X page.
New England Institute of Technology eSports coordinator Brandon Eigenbrode thinks politicians may need to rethink their approach to leveraging Twitch.
“Stuff like that, where you just have a rally and a random game playing that’s completely unrelated, I think that’s the wrong way to do it,” Eigenbrode said.
Both Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump also broadcast their rallies on Twitch, which Eigenbrode thinks may be missing the point of the platform.
“What’s the point of putting it on Twitch if it’s the same thing that’s on TV? That kind of defeats the purpose,” Eigenbrode said.
This isn’t the first election cycle where campaigns are trying to leverage Twitch, either.
In 2020, Ocasio-Cortez went live on her Twitch channel to play the breakout hit game Among Us, a multiplayer game of deception, with Rep. Ilhan Omar and a group of popular Twitch creators including Pokimane, Dr. Lupo and Hasanabi.
According to eSports commentator Rod Breslau, the stream peaked at 439,000 concurrent viewers, at the time the third-highest concurrent viewer count in the platform’s history, with approximately 5.2 million total viewers over the course of the stream.
Highlights of the stream were uploaded by various gaming websites and content creators on YouTube, racking up millions more in VOD views.
Walz and Ocasio-Cortez’s Madden stream fell short of this success, however, peaking at just over 4,000 concurrent viewers, according to Twitchtracker.com.
It’s difficult to quantify the effect these livestream events have on campaigns, but Eigenbrode suggests that if politicians want to successfully leverage Twitch as a platform, they need to focus on what makes it unique – the games.
“To people who do play games, you can kind of realize what [these politicans] are doing, and I think that might have been why AOC playing Among Us was so successful,” Eigenbrode said. “She was just playing a game with other gamers.”
