https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/10/22/video-games-2020-presidential-election-biden-trump/On a Tuesday night, two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “murdered” a star video game streamer in cold blood.
“It feels like an honor to get murdered by AOC,” said Imane “Pokimane” Anys, who played the murder mystery game “Among Us” with Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and a host of other notable streamers during an hours-long session on live-streaming platform Twitch.
At both the beginning and end of the stream, Ocasio-Cortez’s first on her newly minted Twitch channel, the congresswoman pleaded with viewers to register to vote and make a concrete plan to get to the polls on Election Day. The live video feed accumulated more than 1.5 million total views, according to stream analytics site Social Blade, with that number soaring to nearly 5 million less than a day later as more people watched the footage on demand.
While the stream was largely free of political commentary as Ocasio-Cortez completed the game’s tasks and mulled which players looked suspicious, she did take time to appeal to young voters on behalf of Democrat Joe Biden. “Please again make sure you register to vote, make your plan to vote,” she said.
Though not previously thought of as a demographic to target, video game players constitute more than 163 million people of voting age, according to the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group for the gaming industry. Voting rates for people ages 18 to 24 have lagged behind all voters since at least 1966, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, but that cross-section can’t be ignored, since millennials are now the country’s largest generation and, combined with Gen Z, outvoted baby boomers in 2018.
Millennials are also the most Democratic-supporting generation, with a Pew study showing 59 percent of them “identify or lean toward” the Democratic Party.
St. Martin, from Gamers.Vote, said she hopes her group can help make voting a “milestone experience, like turning 16″ and that her fellow gamers understand the role they can have in November. “I don’t think a lot of us knew how powerful our voice could be,” she said.
In Schnur’s eyes, that participation could be critical to the election’s outcome.
“Younger voters will be a key factor,” Schnur said. “The question isn’t whether young people will vote for Biden or vote for Trump. The key question is whether they’ll vote.”
