As he watched the presidential polling results past 11 p.m. election night, Daniel McMurtry said he was “a little nervous and cautiously optimistic.”

“(Donald) Trump wasn’t my first pick,” the president of the university College Republicans said, “but he’s definitely the one I would prefer to win this election.”

McMurtry, a senior engineering major, said watching the Republican candidate barely pulling ahead was “absolutely exhilarating.

“It’s very much surprising me that Trump is winning,” he said. “If Trump becomes president, it’s indicative of a culture shift. Under the Obama administration, political correctness has been forced on us.”

As for the Indiana elections, McMurtry said he’s pleased with Todd Young’s win for the U.S. Senate and Eric Holcomb’s win in the gubernatorial race.

“Todd Young was down 10 points, and his comeback to win was really inspiring,” he said. “I was expecting him to win.”

At 11 p.m., he saw it likely Trump would pull the victory, but he said “anything’s possible.”

Junior business administration major Carrington Crutcher said he was surprised by the election and its impact.

“I didn’t expect the race to be this tight,” he said, glancing at CNN’s election coverage on the TV screen above him.

Crutcher said he was anxious to vote in the election and wanted to instill in disenfranchised voters that voting is still important.

“I didn’t know what to expect at the polls,” said Crutcher, who voted in his first election.

Crutcher said he was interested in two local races involving Democratic State Representative for District 77 Ryan Hatfield and District 1 County Commissioner Ben Shoulders.

“I feel like Ben as a Democrat wants to help out the lower-class and middle-class people,” he said. “I feel like Ben is a real genuine soul.”

Crutcher said he had worked with Shoulders at Old National Bank.

“Every time I had seen him, he was always on the phone,” he said. “But one day he came up to me and told me he was running for county commissioner and asked if I would vote for him.”

English professor Jim Hunter said that local elections are “arguably” more important than presidential elections.

“In a lot of cases local government and local decisions are the ones that have a more direct affect on people’s lives than something at the federal level,” he said.

Hunter said that at the federal level, there has been a basic range of normal political discourse through most of the candidates.

“For a great deal of time in U.S. political culture we’ve had an acceptable range of normal,” he said. “This election is so extraordinary, so outside the norm, that by virtue of its denial of all of what we’ve come to understand as accepted norms, it becomes incredibly important.”

Hunter said he is unsure of the ramifications of the election, but believes things will change.

“I do think that once we violate those political norms and norms of discourse, we’re headed into uncharted territory,” he said. “That uncharted territory might be better than what we have now, but there are too many indication, in my point of view, that it won’t be.”