Deon Turner and a few friends lined up outside Retama Auditorium at 10 a.m., a full five hours before U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke was scheduled to speak on the University of Texas at San Antonio campus.

The event was for the university community, not the general public, but by 2 p.m., with an hour still to go, several hundred students hauling “Beto for Senate” signs were being turned away from the space, reduced by construction to just a 400-person capacity. Some tried to buy their way in with cash offers.

Don’t tell O’Rourke, the El Paso Democrat headed for a Nov. 6 showdown in a tight race challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, that he’s wasting time and energy visiting college campuses this week.

“Consultants and strategists, if we would have spent a dime on them, would have told us not to be here right now, or not to be at UT later today,” O’Rourke told reporters before the event. “But our contention is that young people have not voted in the same numbers that older people have because no one shows up and asks their opinion.”

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Greeted with thunderous applause, he gave a stump speech that included the declaration that he didn’t care who they voted for.

“All I care is that you’re represented,” he said. Democracy “doesn’t work if only some of the people show up and only some have their interests represented.”

Voter turnout among college students is traditionally low. Nationally, about 18 percent of 20 million college and university students voted in the last mid-term elections in 2014, according to data from Tufts University, which conducts the largest survey of student voting.

College students are typically less embedded and engaged in their communities than older populations, said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Most aren’t homeowners watching property tax rates or parents paying attention to public education and health care issues, he said.

But Turner, 23, a first-generation college student whose parents immigrated to the United States from Belize before he was born, predicts more young adults will be motivated to vote this year by racially-tinged rhetoric coming from the White House.

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“For me, politics now in this day and age has gotten so insidious,” Turner said. “I know in this time, in this era, midterm elections are so important.”

The nation’s polarized politics seemed apparent among UTSA students while O’Rourke was on campus. Student protests over Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, occurring outside the auditorium as he spoke, grew heated enough to prompt University President Taylor Eighmy to issue a statement urging forbearance. Posters were damaged and a reported assault was being investigated by UTSA Police, he said.

“All student organizations and individual students have a right to express their opinions on campus as long as they comply with our peaceful public assembly policies,” Eighmy wrote. “That said, I understand that during today’s protest there were some students who felt unsafe, unsupported or traumatized —particularly those who are survivors of sexual assault.”

“The Office of Student Affairs is working with our UTSA Police to reach out to students involved, investigate the matters and determine appropriate sanctions.”

O’Rourke’s campaign has been going against conventional wisdom by reaching out to people who don’t usually vote. The few politicians who bothered to visit his hometown of El Paso left an impression on him, he said in an interview, recalling Jesse Jackson in 1984 on a presidential run when O’Rourke was just 12, and George W. Bush visiting several times during his re-election bid for governor in 1998.

“I’m doing everything in my power in this campaign to show up for everyone,” O’Rourke said.

krista.torralva@express-news.net