Tim Walz's Rally Streams Live on World of Warcraft's Twitch.
This is the new chapter of Kamala Harris's campaign to connect with young male voters.
Kamala Harris's campaign is organizing an unusual event by live-streaming a rally by Tim Walz from Arizona and Azeroth, the famous world from the video game World of Warcraft. This will be the first event where Harris's campaign carries out a live gameplay broadcast on its Twitch account. The activity is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET and will feature a broadcast of Walz's speech in Arizona, while Preheat, a Twitch content creator, will play and provide real-time commentary. Preheat plans to highlight his connection with the campaign and motivate viewers to make voting plans.
Harris's campaign launched its Twitch account in August, where the vice president's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was streamed. This strategy aims to connect with young and disillusioned voters, according to a campaign spokesperson. Seth Schuster, a representative for Harris, said in August that the goal is to break through an extremely personalized media landscape, bringing the vice president's message directly to those harder-to-reach voters who will decide the election.
Preheat has already been preparing for the event by playing World of Warcraft and providing tips to viewers on how to defeat one of the new raid bosses from the expansion The War Within. With over 50,000 followers on Twitch, Preheat has been described by Harris's campaign as a volunteer. When asked about his collaboration with the campaign, he mentioned that there were many reasons behind his decision, citing several platforms promoted by Harris’s team.
The campaign's goal in combining a rally with gameplay from World of Warcraft is to increase visibility for Harris and Walz among young people, as this group makes up a large part of Twitch’s user base, according to a campaign spokesperson. In recent weeks, they have intensified their efforts to attract young men through advertising at major sports events and on gaming sites like IGN.
Both Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's campaigns created Twitch accounts in 2020. Trump's account was suspended following the events of January 6 at the Capitol, but it was reinstated last summer. In contrast, Biden's campaign experimented with varied formats, even broadcasting from the back of a train during his campaign tour, with relaxing music playing in the background.
