Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, will make his Iowa State debut 6 p.m. Wednesday at the M-Shop in the Memorial Union.

“There’s a lot of buzz around Beto,” said College Democrats President Taylor Blair, junior in industrial design. “I’m excited that he’s coming to campus. I think it reflects what he did in his senate campaign, which was a lot of youth engagement, a lot of bringing out people who have never voted before, and I think that’s something that’s going to be essential to winning in 2020.”

O’Rourke lost his 2018 candidacy for the U.S. Senate to Ted Cruz by less than 3 percent, the closest a Democrat has come to winning a Senate seat in Texas since 1988. O’Rourke received 71 percent of the votes from those aged 18-29, according to a CNN exit poll.

This will be O’Rourke’s second trip to Iowa since announcing his candidacy for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination last month. The former El Paso congressman raised more money than any other candidate for his party’s nomination in the first 24 hours of his campaign, bringing in $6.1 million from 128,000 individual contributions.

O’Rourke’s campaign is trying to break a historical trend. No congressman has been elected president without other experience in higher office since President James Garfield in 1880.

In a March Selzer poll conducted before he announced his candidacy found O’Rourke was the first choice of 5 percent of likely-Iowa caucus-goers and the second choice of another 6 percent of voters. However, this poll was entirely conducted before he announced his candidacy.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article listed an incorrect start time for the event. The article has been updated to reflect the actual start time. The Daily regrets this error.