Kamala Harris’ campaign is livestreaming a Tim Walz rally from Arizona and Azeroth tonight. Yes, Azeroth—the planet from World of Warcraft.
This will be the first time the Harris campaign will stream live gameplay on its Twitch account. The event, which will take place at 6:30 pm ET, will include a live feed of Walz’s Arizona speech with Preheat, a Twitch creator, playing the game and providing commentary. Preheat is expected to highlight their connection to the campaign and encourage viewers to make a plan to vote.
The Harris campaign launched its Twitch account in August where it streamed the vice president’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Joining Twitch was part of the campaign’s strategy to reach young, disaffected voters, a campaign spokesperson said at the time.
“Our job as the campaign is to break through a historically personalized media landscape, taking the VP and her vision for the future directly to the hardest-to-reach voters and those who will decide this election,” Seth Schuster, a Harris spokesperson, told WIRED of the decision in August.
Ahead of the rally on Wednesday, Preheat was playing World of Warcraft and instructing viewers on how to defeat one of the more recent raid bosses from The War Within expansion. He has over 50,000 followers on Twitch, and the Harris campaign described him as a volunteer. When asked by WIRED for comment about why they were going to be livestreaming with the campaign, Preheat said they were volunteering for a number of reasons and cited several of the Harris campaign's platforms.
The Harris campaign’s goal in combining the rally with World of Warcraft gameplay is to increase the Harris’ and Walz’s visibility to young men who make up a majority of Twitch’s user base, a Harris spokesperson told WIRED. Over the past few weeks, the campaign has intentionally been trying to reach young men by advertising during major sporting events and on gaming sites like IGN.
The Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns launched Twitch accounts in 2020. Trump’s account was suspended following the January 6 attack on the Capitol but was reinstated this past summer. The Biden campaign played around with formats and once streamed a feed from the back of a train as he was traveling on the campaign trail, set to relaxing music.
