Yesterday evening, in a play that’s becoming increasingly common among both major American political parties, the Democrats once again leveraged the power of influencers in an attempt to reach young voters. This time, Bernie Sanders, the party’s favorite liaison for these things, to whom they refuse to listen where actual policy is concerned, joined an all-star cast of left-leaning streamers: Pokimane, Valkyrae, AustinShow, and Sykkuno, the latter of whom was using a vtuber avatar at the time. Senator Sanders, who is 83 years old, was not familiar with the concept.
Moments after Sanders joined the stream, Sykkuno decided to address the catboy-shaped elephant in the room.
"Normally I have a regular camera,” he said. “I have a skin condition, so I'm using this avatar."
"Hah, OK," Sanders replied, clearly not having any idea what to do with this information.
"Do you know what a vtuber is? Have you heard of a vtuber before?" Sykkuno asked.
"Nope," said Sanders.
"I'm the first one [Sanders has encountered]!” Sykkuno proclaimed triumphantly. “Thank you so much for supporting vtubers."
The streamers went on to try to translate the concept of a vtuber for somebody who is old enough to at least hazily remember the end of World War 2.
"It's when they have this animated profile," said Pokimane, cosplaying as that one meme of Bernie Sanders sitting in a chair.
AustinShow proceeded to stammer out an attempt at an apology, but Sanders found it within himself to play along.
"Well, there you are,” he said after a moment. “You're looking good. You're looking very good."
The rest of the appearance was more or less a standard Bernie stump speech. He talked about the threat Trump poses to democracy and took a harder-line stance on Israel than Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and others who are directly facilitating weapon sales to the genocidal rogue state, calling Biden “dead wrong” when it comes to Israel. He added, however, that Trump will almost certainly be worse on the issue. He also got to rant about healthcare, as is his way. It was a good showing from Bernie, albeit nothing remarkably new.
On YouTube, Valkyrae’s stream of the conversation pulled in over 10,000 concurrent viewers. On Twitch, AustinShow’s peaked at just under 7,000. It wasn’t much compared to Adin Ross’ 580,000-viewer stream with Donald Trump earlier this year, likely because Ross is an edgelord with a penchant for stunts like gifting Trump a Cybertruck emblazoned with a scene from his own attempted assassination while yesterday’s Sanders stream was about as safe as it gets. The Harris campaign has also launched its own Twitch channel and, perplexingly, aired a Tim Walz speech alongside World of Warcraft gameplay from a basically-unheard-of streamer, to mixed results. Outside of more traditional media appearances, Harris herself has largely stuck to podcasts like Call Her Daddy and All The Smoke. The Democrats’ best showing in this arena arguably came when Sanders sat down for an interview with popular comedian and influencer Theo Von in August, a video that pulled in nearly 3 million views. But even that is dwarfed by Trump’s own variation on the theme, which sits at 14 million.
Toward the middle of yesterday’s stream, another celebrity guest, Mark Hamill – aka Luke Skywalker – showed up. Sykkuno reprised his bit from earlier in the broadcast, asking Hamill if he knew what a vtuber was, and Pokimane once again explained the basics.
“Like Sykkuno, who looks like a cat,” said Hamill after Pokimane finished her explanation.
Sykkuno later asked the same question to Mark Cuban, an old rich person who somehow already knew what a vtuber is. Cuban then tried to take credit for the creation of Twitch, at which point I decided I’d had enough and went to go do something else.
