~3 MIN
Streamer Preheat played WoW during a live broadcast from a rally for U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
World of Warcraft players urged to vote in U.S. presidential election
In less than a month, the U.S. presidential election will take place, where the country’s next leader for the coming years will be determined. The two key candidates are Kamala Harris (Democratic Party) and Donald Trump (Republican Party). Both have been actively campaigning for several months, raising awareness and urging voters to support them, sometimes using rather unconventional methods.
Last night, Kamala Harris, alongside her vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, held a rally. The live stream, broadcast on their Twitch channel launched in August for the presidential campaign, was accompanied by gameplay in World of Warcraft. Content creator and former Liquid guild member, Preheat, who is known for his mage class guides, streamed his Azeroth adventures while commenting on the ongoing event and various political topics.
This is the first time Harris and Walz have hosted a live gaming stream on their channel and the first instance where World of Warcraft has been officially used as part of a national presidential campaign. The organizers hope to connect with a younger demographic that may not typically engage with politics.
Here is the stream.
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Here’s what the Wired portal wrote about this event:
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Tim Walz’s rally is broadcast live via a World of Warcraft Twitch stream.
This is the latest chapter in Kamala Harris’s campaign aimed at engaging young male voters.
Kamala Harris’s campaign today will stream Tim Walz’s rally live from both Arizona and Azeroth—the fictional world of World of Warcraft.
This will be the first time Harris’s campaign streams gameplay on their Twitch account. The event, taking place at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, will feature live footage of Walz’s speech in Arizona, while Twitch creator Preheat will play the game and provide commentary. Preheat is expected to emphasize his connection with the campaign and encourage viewers to participate in the upcoming election.
Harris’s campaign launched its Twitch account back in August, where it streamed the vice president’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Joining Twitch was part of a broader strategy to reach young, disengaged voters, as a campaign representative stated at the time.
“Our goal in this campaign is to break through the historically personalized media landscape and deliver the vice president’s message directly to the hardest-to-reach voters,” said Seth Schuster, a Harris representative, in August when speaking to Wired.
Ahead of Wednesday’s rally, Preheat had been playing World of Warcraft and discussing strategies to defeat one of the new raid bosses from The War Within expansion. He has more than 50,000 followers on Twitch, and the Harris campaign described him as a volunteer. When asked by Wired why he chose to livestream during the campaign, Preheat said he volunteered for several reasons, citing a few of Harris’s platform initiatives.
The Harris campaign’s goal with this combination of a rally and World of Warcraft gameplay is to boost Harris and Walz’s visibility among younger voters, who make up a large portion of Twitch’s user base, a Harris representative told Wired. In recent weeks, the campaign has deliberately focused on targeting young people through ads during major sporting events and on gaming sites like IGN.
Both Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns launched Twitch accounts in 2020. Trump’s account was suspended after the January 6 Capitol riot but was reinstated last summer. Biden’s campaign experimented with formats, including one stream where they showed footage from the back of a campaign train set to calming music.