Millennial male voters are a prime prize for Harris and Trump. Her campaign's got a plan

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota made an appearance on a “World of Warcraft” Twitch stream on Wednesday.

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 hugely popular.

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.”

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 is owned by Amazon, is best known as 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 between 18 and 34 years old.

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.

Jonathan Aronson, a communications professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, told B-17 that Walz’s appearance on Twitch was an example of the Harris campaign “seeking alternative paths to get to younger voters.”

“It’s a chess game. Both sides have huge amounts of money to spend. Each side will spend it to try to motivate their supporters to vote, and for the small number of undecided voters to vote,” Aronson said.

Representatives for the Harris campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17 sent outside regular business hours.

Walz’s appearance on Twitch comes as the Harris campaign ramps up its voter outreach. Early voting has already started in several states while Election Day is less than a month away.

Harris, for her part, embarked on a media blitz this week.

She appeared on Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast and sat down for interviews with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the late-night host Stephen Colbert, and the radio host Howard Stern.

For Harris, courting the youth vote could be critical to winning the November election. Data on Statista suggests Gen Zers and millennials will make up around 48.5% of eligible voters for the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

Former President Donald Trump has also been working hard to shore 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.