The Kamala Harris campaign has launched its own Twitch channel, where it plans to stream the vice president’s acceptance speech on Thursday.
The Twitch channel is part of the campaign’s broader strategy to attract younger voters who are harder to reach online. The account, which goes by the handle “kamalaharris,” joins the campaign’s social and streaming accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube.
“The Vice President’s speech tonight will be one of the biggest moments of the campaign so far, and we’re making her speech available live to voters wherever they are, including on Twitch,” Harris campaign spokesman Seth Schuster told WIRED in a statement. “Our job as a campaign is to break through a historically personalized media environment and bring the Vice President and her vision for the future directly to the hardest-to-reach voters and those who will decide this election.”
The Harris-Waltz campaign has invested heavily in digital, employing more than 175 staffers across digital organization, content production, digital advertising and fundraising. In the week since Harris rose to the top of the Democratic field, her rebranded TikTok account, “KamalaHQ,” saw a five-fold increase in followers, with Harris-focused content garnering 232 million views and 33 million likes.
As many as 200 creators have been granted access to cover the Democratic National Convention this week, marking the first time independent creators have been allowed on-site, giving them the opportunity to interview politicians and party leaders like DNC Chair Jaime Harrison.
The Harris campaign is not the first to join Twitch; the Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns also joined the platform in 2020. Trump’s account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and was only reinstated this summer. When the Biden campaign’s channel launched, they streamed live from the back of the train the current president was riding, playing lo-fi beats reminiscent of 24-hour chill-out music streams.
