"He talked a lot about what he was going to do, but does he have the guts to do what he needs to do?" Dixit said.
The election is also a validation for young people, Hoppe said, a group that experts assumed was apathetic about politics.
"It really felt like the first time in my life where I could be idealistic - even if it was just for a day," she said. "My generation has grown up with so much irony and so much cynicism."
Brothers Zishan and Salman Mohammed said they felt that energy when students erupted into spontaneous celebration on Baltimore's 33rd Street, shortly after the election returns came in.
"I had no idea who was jumping on top of me, I was holding hands with students I never met before," said Salman, a 22-year-old senior from Plano, Texas, who was born in Pakistan. "It didn't matter that they were McCain supporters or Ron Paul supporters, they were excited that America was changing. And they were a part of it."
Zishan, a 23-year-old graduate student in biotechnology at Hopkins, said he thinks Obama can improve America's image abroad. Foreign nations don't hate America, he said, they're just frustrated with it.
"They want to be like America," he said. "They just are just wondering how long will it take to have the democracy that America has. They have a lot of respect for Obama."
As the nation's diversity increases, the ethnic and racial groups that backed Obama could produce long-term electoral success for Democrats. The Republican Party made gains among Hispanic voters with George W. Bush on the ticket, but those have eroded. Republican efforts to attract blacks have largely fizzled. The GOP is entering a period of regrouping, figuring out how to attract members of ethnic groups that seem to prefer Democrats.
Lam, the Nicaragua native, scoffs at the pundits who questioned if Latino voters could vote for a black man. After Hillary Clinton enjoyed huge Latino support in the primaries, they voted for Obama over John McCain at a margin of nearly 2 to 1, according to an analysis of exit polls by the Pew Hispanic Center.
"He crossed over, and that is essential," he said. "It is the maximum expression of democracy in this country. You had white voters, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, it was voters across the board that made this happen. It was a mixture. It had to be a mixture."
