Pokémon GO to the Polls

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Part of a series on Hillary Clinton. [View Related Entries]

About

Pokémon GO to the Polls refers to a series of comments made about a joke made by then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on stage during a 2016 campaign rally. Most have mocked Clinton's comments for awkwardly using the popularity of the video game Pokémon GO as a portmanteau about voting.

Origin

On July 14th, 2016, at a campaign event in northern Virginia, then-candidate Hillary Clinton encouraged the audience to vote by saying "I don't know who created Pokémon Go, but I want to figure out how to get them to have Pokémon Go to the polls" (video below).

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Various news outlets covered the comments, including Business Insider,^[1] Mic.,^[2] CNN,^[3] The Hill^[4] and more.

That day, the campaign for her then-opponent Donald Trump posted a video mocking the joke. The post received more than 230,000 reactions, 180,000 shares and 12 million views in two years (shown below).

Many online mocked the joke, referring to it as cringey and using variations of the joke "Pokémon stop (example below, left).^[5] Twitter^[6] user @denimcrocs posted an image of them supposedly deleting their Pokémon GO application (shown below, center).

Others felt that people were exaggerating their opinions of the joke. Twitter^[7] user @jimpjorps tweeted, "fuck all y'all, if Bernie [Sanders] said 'Pokemon go to the polls' y'all would be calling him slay grampa." The tweet received more than 60 retweets and 200 likes in two years (shown below, right).

On July 19th, YouTuber KSI posted a reaction video to the joke. The post received more than 6 million views in two years (shown below).

On September 6th, Urban Dictionary ^[8] user DATBOI69( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) defined the expression in an entry. They wrote, "A term used by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a joke on the world wide successful video game Pokemon GO to get people to vote for her" (shown below).