LOS ANGELES: The political chasm in the United States between liberals and conservatives also reflects a growing racial divide, according to a study released on Thursday.

The most conservative US cities have mainly white populations and the most liberal have large African-American communities, said the Bay Area Centre for Voting Research in Berkeley, California, which examined voting patterns in 237 American cities.

The survey ranked Provo, Utah as the most conservative city, with 86 per cent of voters supporting President George W. Bush or other right-wing candidates in last year’s presidential election, said Jason Alderman, a researcher at the centre. Provo has a virtually all white population and is home to the Mormon church’s Brigham Young University, the largest church-affiliated college in the country.

Detroit, which has a predominantly African-American composition, topped the liberal list, followed by Gary, Indiana, Berkeley and the nation’s capital, Washington.

“Detroit and Provo epitomize America’s political, economic and racial polarization,” the centre said in a press release. The most right-leaning cities are clustered in southern states and in interior western states while the most solidly liberal cities concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest and California.

While the number of Hispanic voters has grown dramatically in states such as California and Texas, their political leanings varied from city to city, Alderman said. The survey confirmed the right-wing reputation of Texas, Bush’s home state, with three cities ranking among the top five most conservative. Lubbock and Abilene ranked second and third and Plano came in as the fifth most conservative city.

The results confounded conventional thinking that university towns with affluent white voters represented the most liberal spots on the map, Alderman said.

“We were expecting to find Volvo-driving, Prius-driving pony-tail types to be leading the way, but they are the exceptions,” he said.—AFP