Kamala Harris is officially on Twitch.
The vice president and Democratic presidential nominee now has her own streaming channel on the platform, as the campaign moves to reach more younger voters.
The account, with the handle kamalaharris, streamed Harris' speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Thursday night, with featured clips already posted by the campaign team. Harris currently has 6.6K followers at the time of writing; her opponent Donald Trump has 174K followers.
Joe Biden and Trump's campaigns joined Twitch in 2020. Trump was suspended from the platform in 2020 for "hateful conduct," then banned in 2021 after encouraging violent extremists to storm the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6. Twitch reinstated Trump's channel in July 2024 after he accepted the Republican presidential nomination. Other major tech platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and X/Twitter have also lifted their bans on Trump.
"We reinstated former President Trump’s Twitch channel," said a Twitch spokesperson in July, via The Verge. "We believe there is value in hearing from Presidential nominees directly, when possible. Trump is now the official Republican nominee for U.S. president."
The Twitch move for Harris comes a month after the vice president officially joined TikTok. Wired reports the Harris-Walz campaign has 175 staffers dedicated to digital strategy including content creation and online ads, and the latest, expansion to platforms like Twitch. The DNC has also wooed influencers at this year's DNC, with the campaign inviting over 200 content creators to cover the event alongside journalists — the first time influencers have been invited to do so.
As Elizabeth de Luna writes for Mashable, "The reality is that Gen Z could be kingmakers in this election. NBC exit polls from the 2020 election suggested that 65 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 — an age group almost entirely made of Gen Zers — voted for President Joe Biden. That was 11 percent more than any other age group. Since then, the support of Gen Z and millennial voters had become consistently elusive to the President."
Harris' Twitch account is the latest in the presidential nominee's collection of social media accounts. Here's what the follower numbers look like:
In the midst of a bipartisan push to ban TikTok in the U.S., Harris has 4.6 million followers on TikTok; Trump has 10.5 million. Joe Biden's official campaign TikTok account, @bidenhq, created in February, has been rebranded as @harrishq, an official Harris campaign account, which has 3.8 million followers and hosts both new videos and Biden's previous posts. Wired reports the account's followers "quintupled" in the week Harris became the top Democratic presidential choice, with content posted getting 232 million views and 33 million likes.
On X (formerly Twitter), Trump has 89.9 million followers; Harris has 20.8 million; Biden has 38.5 million.
On Instagram, Harris has 17.7 million followers; Trump has 26.3 million; Biden has 17.3 million.
On YouTube, Trump has 3.1 million subscribers; Harris has 431K; Biden has 896K but The White House account has 2.1 million.
Topics Social Media Politics Twitch
