Tim Walz and AOC Play Football Video Game on Twitch to Target Young Men | US elections 2024

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played an American football video game against each other via stream on Sunday, as the two Democrats continued their party's efforts to win votes from young men just nine days before the White House election.

While streaming their showdown in the latest edition of the Madden game series, Ocasio-Cortez and Walz stressed the importance of regaining Democratic control of the US House of Representatives, maintaining a majority in the Senate and ensuring that Kamala Harris wins the presidential election November 5th Donald Trump wins.

“We don’t all have the same politics, we don’t all hold the same views, but the need to defeat Trump this year was my top priority,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

She joined others who described Trump as an aspiring authoritarian ruler and fascist backed by special interests who are exacerbating the ongoing climate crisis. She also discussed how the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post blocked their newsrooms from supporting Harris over Trump, calling it “a moment of plutocracy masking.”

During the stream, Ocasio-Cortez also criticized comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash” during Trump's rally at New York's Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

Ocasio-Cortez — who is from the Bronx and is of Puerto Rican descent — called Hinchcliffe an “a-hole.”

“You know they think that about you … (and) anyone who makes less money than them,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez said she had spoken to Walz a few weeks earlier when he expressed interest in doing a game stream with her. They agreed to play Madden because he was a former soccer coach and was familiar with the series from playing with his children.

Walz visited the stream ahead of a campaign rally in Nevada, logging in around 3:30 p.m. ET before describing a history of gaming dating back to the original Pac Man, which hit arcades in 1980. He played with the Minnesota Vikings and Ocasio-Cortez played the Buffalo Bills as about 12,000 users watched.

Walz – Minnesota's governor – and Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitch after a recent NBC News poll showed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with a two percentage point lead over Donald Trump among young male registered voters.

Despite the lead, Democrats have performed better among the demographic in previous election cycles, which is a concern for the party. And on Friday, Trump's campaign appeared to try to heighten concerns by having the former president spend three hours on Joe Rogan's podcast, whose audience is largely made up of young men and whose show frequently tops the global charts on both Apple and Spotify.

There were rumors that Harris once performed with Rogan, but a meeting never occurred. And instead, it was Trump who advocated replacing the income tax with tariffs and recalled the “genius” of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate military general who owned enslaved people and commanded the white supremacist and losing side of the United States US Civil War.

Sunday's event with Ocasio-Cortez came after her first appearance on the Twitch platform in 2020 and was one of the platform's most-watched events at the time. Weeks later, Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden.

Sunday's session also came after the Harris campaign live-streamed a rolling rally on Twitch in early October while simultaneously playing the World of Warcraft game live.

Another Harris campaign strategy aimed at supporting young men focused on a series of ads on sports betting platforms DraftKings, Yahoo Sports and on sites such as IGN (short for Imagine Games Network) and Fandom.