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Before this pandemic, politicians substituting speeches on packed convention floors with Twitch streams would’ve seemed most-implausible; and yet, as is AOC’s habit with breaking the mold, she organized a stream with some of gaming’s most-coveted fixtures–as expected and given the young congresswoman’s notoriety among the younger electorate, the stream was a massive hit.
What makes AOC’s entry into the streaming space particularly distinct, is that it wasn’t done without any priors or familiarity with the format whatsoever. She’d appeared on a fundraiser for a trans charity last year, and has been a recurrent guest on Bernie Sanders’ channel prior to the suspension of his presidential campaign–the cachet was already present, and all that was left is for AOC to make her official debut on the website. Soon enough she did, and on Tuesday night, she opened up with Among Us to a whopping 439k concurrent viewers at peak with the stream later settling around the 300k mark, placing it only behind the Drake and Ninja collab in 2018 and Shroud’s return to Twitch stream this August as the third in contention for the most-viewed stream in the platform’s history.
