Tim Walz and AOC play football video game on Twitch in appeal to young men

Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday streamed themselves playing an American football video game against each other on Sunday as the two Democrats continued their party’s efforts to secure votes from young men just nine days before the White House election.

During the stream of their showdown on the latest edition of the Madden game series, Ocasio-Cortez and Walz exalted the importance of regaining Democratic control of the US House, maintaining a majority in the Senate and ensuring Kamala Harris wins the 5 November presidential election against Donald Trump.

“We don’t all share the same politics, we don’t all share the same views, but the need to defeat Trump this year has been my number one priority,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

She echoed others who have called Trump an aspiring authoritarian ruler and fascist supported by special interests who are exacerbating the ongoing climate crisis. She also discussed how the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post prevented their editorial teams endorsing Harris over Trump, referring to it as “a plutocracy mask-off moment”.

Ocasio-Cortez said she spoke with Walz a couple of weeks earlier when he expressed interest in doing a game stream with her. They agreed to play Madden because he used to be a football coach, and he was familiar with the series having gamed with his children.

Walz attended the stream prior to a campaign rally in Nevada, logging on at about 3.30pm ET before detailing a history with gaming dating back to the original Pac Man, which hit arcades in the 1980. He played with the Minnesota Vikings and Ocasio-Cortez with the Buffalo Bills as about 12,000 users watched.

Walz – Minnesota’s governor – and Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitch after a recent NBC News survey found the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris had a lead of two percentage points over Donald Trump with young male registered voters.

Despite the edge, Democrats have polled better among the demographic in previous election cycles, creating concern among the party. And on Friday, Trump’s campaign seemingly tried to add to concern, having the former president spend three hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast, whose audience is predominantly young men and whose show often leads the global charts on both Apple and Spotify.

Harris at one point was rumored to appear with Rogan, but the sit-down never materialized. And instead it was Trump who took the spot to make his case for replacing income tax with tariffs and to reminisce about the “genius” of Robert E Lee, the Confederate military general who owned enslaved people and commanded the white supremacist, losing side of the US civil war.

Sunday’s event with Ocasio-Cortez came after her first appearance on the Twitch platform in 2020 was one of the platform’s most watched events at that time. Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden weeks later.

Sunday’s session also came after the Harris campaign earlier in October live-streamed a Walz rally on Twitch alongside live play of the World of Warcraft game.

Another Harris campaign strategy targeting the support of young men has centered on a series of ads on the sports gambling platform DraftKings, Yahoo Sports, and on websites such as IGN (short for Imagine Games Network) and Fandom.