- Harris and Trump are working hard to court the young male vote.
- On Wednesday, Harris’ running mate Tim Walz appeared on a “World of Warcraft” Twitch stream.
- Nearly half of the eligible voters for this election are Gen Z and millennial voters, per Statista.
Vice President Kamala Harris is sending her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, to shore up a critical segment of voters for the coming election — young men.
On Wednesday evening, Walz was featured on a “World of Warcraft” Twitch stream. The multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard was released in 2004 and is still popular today.
The livestream, which ran for an hour and a half, included a live feed of Walz’s rally in Arizona beside Twitch creator Preheat’s gaming feed.
“GOP is the opposite of POG, and we here to POG out,” said Preheat, who has over 51,000 Twitch followers and was the host of Wednesday’s stream. “POG” is internet slang for a clutch play and a word often used by gamers in iterations like “POGChamp” and “poggers.”
When approached for comment, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign told Wired that Wednesday’s livestream was part of their outreach to young male voters, who form a large part of Twitch’s user base.
Twitch, which Amazon owns, is best known for being a platform where people stream themselves playing games. The livestreaming service, citing internal data, said that it has 105 million average monthly visitors and that 70% of its viewers are aged between 18 and 34.
To be sure, this isn’t the first time the Harris campaign has attempted to reach out to this demographic.
Besides Twitch, Harris’ campaign has run ads on the gaming site IGN and during major sporting events like NFL games. “Geeks & Nerds for Harris,” a pro-Harris organization, also held a stream in September to rally support for her.
Representatives for the Harris campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
Walz’s appearance on Twitch comes as the Harris campaign advances its outreach to voters, who are set to hit the polls in less than a month.
Harris, for her part, embarked on a media blitz this week.
Besides appearing on the latest episode of Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast on Sunday, Harris has also done interviews with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” late-night host Stephen Colbert, and radio host Howard Stern.
For Harris, courting the youth vote could be critical to winning the November election. According to Statista, Gen Zers and millennials will make up around 48.5% of eligible voters for the upcoming 2024 presidential election.
Her rival, former President Donald Trump, has also been working hard on shoring up the young male vote.
In recent months, Trump has been busy hitting the podcast circuit, doing interviews with Logan Paul, Theo Von, Adin Ross, and Lex Fridman.
In his interview with Fridman, which aired last month, Trump said podcast interviews offered him greater visibility and reach to voters.
“You have a great podcast. It’s very well-watched. And I’m sitting here, and I do this, a lot of people see it. And I do other things, and a lot of people see that,” Trump told Fridman.
“And I go traditional also, you know, you have traditional television, which is getting a little bit older and maybe less significant, could be less significant, I don’t know. But it’s changing a lot,” Trump added.
