Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who has announced his candidacy for the 2020 presidential election, has seen a great deal of success by appealing to younger voters. The Sanders campaign will continue targeting the youth vote with its latest initiative, which sees Bernie Sanders start his very own Twitch channel.
The Bernie Sanders Twitch channel is labeled under the Just Chatting category on the site, so it's unlikely that fans will get to see him play Fortnite with Ninja or anything crazy like that. Instead the Bernie Sanders Twitch channel will be reserved for live political content, with Bernie and his team discussing news and the campaign on not just Twitch, but Facebook and YouTube as well.
Speaking to Vox, Josh Miller-Lewis, the digital communications director for the Sanders campaign, explained the decision to start doing these live presentations on Twitch. "We're moving toward doing a lot more live content on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook, tapping into an audience where there's not a lot of political content already."
While most all of the politicians currently running for president are active on social media, it seems Bernie is the first one to start his own Twitch channel. Whether or not this is effective in courting new voters remains to be seen, but it will be interesting to see if other politicians take inspiration from Bernie and create their own Twitch channels as well.
This isn't the first time Bernie's name has popped up in the world of video game news recently. Last week, Bernie called for the video game industry to unionize, a topic that has been hotly debated. There is concern about excessive work hours for video game developers because of crunch time, not to mention companies' tendency to mass hire people and then proceed with mass layoffs. Pro-union people feel that an unionized video game industry would put a stop to those practices. Those who are anti-union, meanwhile, bring up the possibility of video game prices rising if the industry were to unionize, as well as the chance that a more qualified person is passed over in favor of a less-qualified individual for a job due to union protection.
There was even a Bernie Sanders Kickstarter video game in development at some point, though that hasn't been updated in quite some time. For now, Sanders will just have to reach out to gamers through his Twitch channel.
Source: Vox