St. Paul: We're number 36!

A new study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research says St. Paul ranks 36th most liberal among the nation's 237 cities with populations of 100,000 or more.

The Berkeley-based think tank examined voting records across the country and ranked each city. Detroit, Mich, ranked as the most liberal and Provo, Utah, ranked as the most conservative.

You can see the listings yourself at http://votingresearch.org/USAliberalcities.doc.

There's some amusing correlations in the rankings. Madison, Wis., home to the nation's largest organized celebration of the marijuana harvest, known as Weedstock, ranked only two notches above St. Paul, and 11 spots BELOW that left wing bastion to the west, Minneapolis.

But it wasn't just a matter of politics, BACVR researchers found. They noted a direct correlation between voting patterns and racial makeup. The higher the proportion a city had of African Americans, the more liberally it tended to vote. "The great political divide in America today is not red vs. blue, north vs. south, costal vs. interior or even rich vs. poor. It is now clearly black vs. white," said Phil Reiff, a BACVR director in a release that accompanies the study.

That's certainly true in St. Paul, where minority and white precincts have been sharply divided in recent polling, particularly during municipal elections.