AOC on Twitch was good because AOC is good
you think Tom Cotton could get 400K people to watch him do anything? (we'll see in 2024)
Out of all the unexpected moments of 2020, having the largest Get Out The Vote (GOTV for those in the know (ITK)) event of this election cycle take place on Twitch on a Tuesday night maybe isn’t that high up there but nonetheless, it’s significant.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the live-streaming platform Twitch last Tuesday night to stream herself playing the popular game Among Us alongside some well-known streamers. Fellow squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar and Omar’s daughter, Isra Hirsi (who owned the rig Omar used to play), also joined the game.
The stream was part of a GOTV effort for the upcoming election. AOC reminded viewers to make a plan to vote and plugged the website IWIllVote.com multiple times throughout the night.
If you’re unfamiliar with Among Us, here is my lil love letter to the game that explains it a bit. The main thing is that it's a mafia-style game where there are one or two imposters and everyone is trying to figure out who they are before the imposters kill them off.
Among Us is probably the most popular game right now — due to so many qualities that have made it the perfect quarantine game — and was the perfect game for AOC to stream because anyone could quickly understand it and enjoy watching.
AOC’s debut stream was viewed by over 435,000 people and is now the third most-viewed stream on the platform. In total, more than half a million people tuned in across various channels to watch AOC play.
A lot of the articles that covered AOC’s Among Us stream discuss how this is the “future of political campaigning” or the “future of politics” or should be considered the “blueprint for voter outreach.” While I agree with the idea that Twitch is a potentially great medium for political outreach, the reason AOC’s stream was so successful was because of AOC herself. By this, I also mean that other politicians might struggle to find the success she has found on the platform.
There’s no denying AOC is good at social media. She is someone people want to interact with online, and she makes quality content that often breaks the mold of most digital political content.
She also has a knack for engaging with popular video games and trends in a way that doesn’t feel like pandering because she is familiar with them. AOC actually plays Animal Crossing and League of Legends, two of the games she has mentioned on social media. Other politicians have tried to get pr by engaging with pop culture trends or popular platforms but what they produce feels forced and is rarely entertaining (remember Pokémon Go to the polls?).
This is how politicians should interact with others online
But AOC put on a good stream. There was suspense, banter, good commentary, engagement with viewers, video game lore discussion(!) and all the hijinks that Among Us lends itself to. She also showed a deftness for MCing when muting her mic so that she could either engage in the conversation with the other players or provide commentary to her viewers. This is a bit of a low bar for most people but fairly impressive for a member of Congress.
AOC caters her content to the platform she is on. Besides her tweets, the New York representative gets significant audiences when she goes live on Instagram and is known for her Instagram stories. This content might make it to Twitter or Facebook, but it’s cut down into clips that make sense for those platforms. Too often politicians will just do the same thing on multiple platforms, especially with streams, and fail to think of them as separate entities that need tailored content.
Online interactions definitely feel more normal (as in not second to irl interactions), especially with the ongoing pandemic that has made the internet our main form of interaction. This can make it hard for politicians to engage with voters online without it feeling like pandering, especially when campaigns don’t value digital outreach and treat online engagement as secondary to irl engagement.
Twitch isn’t a great platform for most politicians because they are not allowed to monetize their channels, to use it to fundraise, or to run ads. But Twitch is a platform that often feels more intimate than social media and it’s quickly becoming a social media platform in and of itself. Many streamers consistently engage with their audiences via the live stream chat in a way that can’t be replicated on YouTube or other one-way engagement platforms. In theory, this two-way interaction that Twitch provides should make it easier to mobilize followers, but it’s too early to tell whether it can actually serve this purpose. However, we do know that AOC drove heavy traffic to IWillVote.org that night.
It’s worth nothing that even though conservatives are on Twitch, they have not gathered a following in the way they have on platforms like Facebook or YouTube. Trump has a Twitch channel, but he only uses it to stream rallies, news clips and short clips — some that aim to make him look good, some that seem out of place.
Twitch might present the toughest challenge for politicians as it requires technical knowledge, video game abilities, MCing capabilities and on top of all that the ever-elusive authenticity factor. That’s also why the stream went so well for AOC. She has all these qualities.
When looking for authenticity, it’s hard to know what it looks like but when it’s present it’s apparent. AOC’s stream had a number of authentic moments
Note: since authenticity is in the eyes of the beholder, this is of course subjective and merely what I perceived as authentic.
Even if she was a novice at Among Us, the way AOC interacted with the stream and the game made it clear she was not new to video games or to streaming. As The Washington Post’s Gene Park noted, she was at ease during the stream, like when she had to spend minutes addressing audio level issues (a common issue with Twitch). There was a moment when she thought she saw Rep. Omar vent (something that would give Omar away as the imposter) but AOC questioned what she saw because she wasn’t sure if it was a glitch or the animation that happens when venting (it turned out to be a glitch though Omar also turned out to be an imposter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Park writes about how this showed AOC’s “familiarity with how video game physics and animation can dictate how games are played” and lets viewers gauge the earnestness of these characteristics.
What AOC did last week probably shouldn’t be considered a “new playbook” for voter engagement but it should be something that other politicians take note of. If they try to replicate what she did they’ll likely fail because they don’t have the qualities needed to pull it off. Even Rep. Omar’s stream wasn’t as good (despite being way better than AOC at Among Us), partly because she wasn’t that good at MCing (or wasn’t attempting to be). In her defense, she might have also had some technical difficulties.
But AOC did prove that there are new unexplored ways of reaching voters online, especially voters that might not be on other platforms. It’s up to politicians and campaigns to understand these platforms, find the ones that are best suited for them and make engaging content that doesn’t feel forced. But that also requires some vulnerability and risk-taking, so we’ll see if they’re open to it. Maybe their kids will convince them to go for it.
