How AOC has connected with voters like nobody else

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch Stream is her latest activity garnering voter support.

Since she was elected a Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been the subject of intense attention. As the youngest woman ever to serve in the United States Congress, she has been given equal amounts of admiration by younger voters and disdain from older voters and congresspeople due to her relative youth and confidence. Additionally, much of the hate she receives is also tied to her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and her support of various progressive policies such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. This has ranged from a multitude of death threats from the enraged public to hours of criticism from prominent conservative personalities, and in the most distasteful case, expletives being launched at her by fellow congresspeople.

On the flip-side, Ocasio-Cortez has received an outpouring of support that has never been seen before. She has been able to use her youth and progressive ideology to connect with a younger generation of voters and get them interested in the politics of their country in ways that no other politician has been able to so far. Boasting 9.4 million followers on Twitter and 7.4 million on Instagram, AOC’s social media following dwarfs that of her fellow politicians and rivals notable internet celebrities. She has done so by being outspoken about the issues she believes in and by embracing social media as a tool to get her message across.

On October 20, Ocasio-Cortez asked her Twitter followers if she should play Among Us, a hit video game centered around a simple premise. Much like the party game Mafia, players found themselves on a spaceship with other players, two of them being “impostors”. The impostors’ goal was to kill everyone on the spaceship without being discovered, while other players are tasked with performing maintenance tasks on their spaceship while also trying to catch the impostors and exile them before they had a chance to murder everybody. The game proved to be a smash hit due to its social aspect and relative ease of access, with many who had never played video games before becoming massive fans of it. So, when Ocasio-Cortez decided to let her fans watch her play the game on the popular video game service Twitch, they came in droves. At the peak of the stream, around half a million people decided to watch her, along with fellow congresswoman Ilhan Omar and other popular streamers like Pokimane and Hasan Abi.

The stream went down as one of the most-watched in Twitch history, coming close to the record of 628,000, garnering AOC support from new voters, and reinforcing the support she was given from her ongoing supporters as well. Of course, older congressmen and voters had no idea why she was playing video games instead of doing something useful, but the time she spent playing video games has gotten a lot more people interested in politics than a lot of other congresspeople.