Summary
Kamala Harris’s presidential bid has reachedFortnite, with her campaign just launching an elaborate creative map for Epic’s hit battle royale game. The custom map is expected to remain available toFortniteplayers indefinitely.
The U.S. 2024 presidential election is scheduled for November 5. Both the Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance campaigns have long been ramping up theirefforts to reach votersin the run-up to the event. To that end, both candidates' teams have so far made unconventional attempts to reach young voters, a demographic that historically has low voter turnout.
In yet another testament to this trend, the Harris-Walz campaign has launched acreativeFortnitemapon Monday, October 28. Called Freedom Town, USA, the custom stage can now be accessed using creative map code7331-5536-6547. Freedom Town was even treated to an energetic launch trailer that provides an overview of the new map to the tune ofNeva Playby Megan Thee Stallion and BTS’s RM.
Harris-Walz Fortnite Map Focuses on Exploration
The promotional materials released by the Harris-Walz campaign suggest that Freedom Town is predominantly geared toward exploration. As is expected from a product of a political initiative, the map features a wide variety of slogans and set pieces aiming to motivateFortniteplayers to vote. A large-scale Statue of Liberty is part of the stage, feeding into its theme of freedom. The map is currently being promoted via multiple partner streams byFortnitecontent creators such as Khairi “Kdot” Harris and Morgan “MODELMORG” Pope, IGNreports.
Freedom Town is not the Harris-Walz campaign’s first attempt to reach out to young voters via video games. Over the final weekend of October 2024, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and vice presidential candidate Gov.Tim Walz playedMadden NFL 25on Twitch, while also answering some viewer questions from the chat. Before concluding the broadcast, Walz moved on to Sega’sCrazy Taxi, his long-time favorite that he used to play on the Sega Dreamcast in 2000 before his wife made him get rid of it, as he has repeatedly recounted in the past.
The Trump-Vance campaign has also been making some concentrated efforts to use livestreaming to reach out to the younger demographic in the run-up to the presidential election. In early August 2024,Donald Trump joined Adin Ross for an extended Kick broadcast, where they discussed politics. Seeing how youth voter turnout in the U.S. has historically been fairly low, successfully motivating a portion of the youngest voters to cast their ballots could prove decisive in the upcoming election, which most polls predict to be extremely close.
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