They're often said to be the future of politics, and this week, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar proved it. The two livestreamed themselves playing a popular murder mystery game, and in so doing all but took over the streaming platform Twitch.
AOC and Omar took to the platform in an effort to get out the vote, and it seems to have worked handily. At its peak, their livestream drew 400,000 viewers to a voter registration website.
It all began when AOC threw out the idea of a Twitch stream on Twitter, and asked who'd like to play her in the murder mystery game.
Among Us is a covert multiplayer game set on a spaceship where players try to deduce the identity of a killer.
Because of self-isolation measures, and the game's easy access across all sorts of platforms—both Macs and PCs, Android phones and iPhones—its popularity has exploded during the pandemic. As of Oct. 1, it has been downloaded 100 million times—making it perfect for AOC's attempt to drive voter registration.
And given the game's popularity, it's no surprise that AOC's invite drew plenty of responses.
Before long, Representative Omar had thrown her name into the hat to play, and was soon showing off her gaming set-up during the stream.
Several hugely popular Twitch personalities joined is as well, like gamer pokimane, musician Mxmtoon, and political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
For Ocasio-Cortez, her first-ever Twitch stream reportedly drew 4.8 million people over the course of its duration. The stream referred viewers to the website IWillVote.com, a site where people can check their voter registration status, register to vote, and get information on how to vote in person or by mail. AOC's stream was the #1 driver of traffic to the website for part of its duration.
So it's safe to say, if voter registration was the goal here: Mission accomplished! Among the people she inspired to vote, in fact, was popular gamer and Twitch streamer Myth, whose Twitch stream has more than 7 million followers.
After the conclusion of AOC's stream, he announced on Twitter, to AOC's delight, that he will be voting for the first time in November.
On Twitter, AOC and Omar's fellow gamers were thrilled to be going up against them in the game.
And non-gamers were loving the moment too.
The wild popularity of the Reps' Twitch stream brought AOC another unintended victory: She now has 642,000 Twitch followers, more than more four times as many as President Trump. The future of politics, indeed.
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