In my Social Stratification and Mobility course I teach at the University of Warsaw, I spent the first five weeks relating social stratification topics to the U.S. presidential election, focusing on the following topics: political inequality more generally, race, gender and social class (and intersections).  Most of the slides concern basics in social stratification with empirical evidence of the social, economic and political divide between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Powerpoint lectures are here.

Exit polls are coming in.  How did disadvantaged groups vote?  The New York Times has an excellent interactive graph of exit polls.  You can easily compare “who voted for whom” of the 2008 election to every presidential election dating back to 1980.  More comprehensive exit polls, including questions about race, can be found at CNN.