Walz and AOC Play Madden

With the Kamala Harris campaign struggling to connect with male voters, their latest strategy—having Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gov. Tim Walz play Madden on a live stream—has been widely ridiculed.

The move, intended to make Harris’s platform more relatable, only underscored the campaign’s issues with authenticity. The gaming session, which fizzled out by halftime with neither player scoring a single point, quickly devolved from a light-hearted gimmick into a symbolic flop.

The event’s awkwardness hit a peak when Walz, who often touts his background as a high school football “assistant coach,” struggled to keep up with a political novice in Madden. To make matters worse, Walz followed up with a tweet praising Ocasio-Cortez’s “mean pick 6,” clearly misunderstanding the term.

His attempt to sound like a seasoned football fan backfired, as “running a pick 6” is nonsensical to anyone who knows the game—a detail that was lost on the campaign but not on viewers, and the tweet was swiftly deleted.

This gaming debacle reflects a bigger issue for the Harris campaign: an authenticity gap that resonates with voters. Walz’s background has been repeatedly questioned, with accusations that he has exaggerated his coaching experience to boost his political brand.

Combined with Harris’s own reputation for overly scripted appearances, this latest stunt has added fuel to the notion that the campaign struggles to genuinely connect.

Even for those not inclined to vote Republican, the stream was puzzling at best. Any man interested in watching Madden on Twitch would have seen right through the spectacle, with Ocasio-Cortez barely even playing the game and Walz awkwardly steering the conversation toward politics.

For the Harris team, the problem is not simply that the Madden stunt failed—it’s that it did nothing to shore up their appeal to key demographics and may have even deepened skepticism around Harris’s choice of Walz as running mate.

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