Americans are sharply divided on racial lines heading into the first presidential election in which an African-American will be the major party nominee, a new poll shows.

Barack Obama [Images], who is attempting to script history by being the first black President of the United States, leads his Republican rival John McCain [Images] among all registered voters by 45 per cent to 39 per cent.

However, in a sign of how racially polarised US voters are, Obama draws support from 89 per cent of blacks, compared with two per cent for McCain, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Among whites, Obama has 37 per cent of the vote, compared with 46 per cent for McCain, said the poll reflecting the race relations in the country.

In a finding that would require the 47-year-old senator to make a major effort to win White voters in the November election, more than 80 per cent of black voters had favourable opinion of Obama while only 30 per cent Whites had the same feelings for him.

Nearly 60 per cent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 per cent of whites.

However, black and white Americans agree that America is ready to elect a black president, but disagree on almost every other question about race in the poll.

Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing.

About one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks, the poll found.

The survey suggests that even as the nation crosses a racial threshold when it comes to politics -- Obama is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas -- many of the racial patterns in society remain unchanged in recent years, the Times said.

The poll showed markedly little change in the racial components of people's daily lives since 2000, when The Times examined race relations in an extensive series of articles called 'How Race Is Lived in America'.

As it was eight years ago, few Americans have regular contact with people of other races, and few say their own workplaces or their own neighbourhoods are integrated.

In this latest poll, over 40 per cent of blacks said they believed they had been stopped by the police because of their race, the same figure as eight years ago; 7 per cent of whites said the same thing.

Nearly 70 per cent of blacks said they had encountered a specific instance of discrimination based on their race, compared with 62 per cent in 2000; 26 per cent of whites said they had been the victim of racial discrimination.

And when asked whether blacks or whites had a better chance of getting ahead in today's society, 64 per cent of black respondents said that whites did. That figure was slightly higher even than the 57 per cent of blacks who said so in a 2000 poll by The Times.

And the number of blacks who described racial conditions as generally bad in this survey was almost identical to poll responses in 2000 and 1990.

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted July 7-14 with 1,796 adults, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

In an effort to measure views of different races, the survey included larger-than-usual minority samples of 297 blacks and 246 Hispanics with a margin of sampling error of six percentage points for each subgroup.

Black voters were far more likely than whites to say that Obama cares about the needs and problems of people like them, and more likely to describe him as patriotic.

Whites were more likely than blacks to say that Obama says what he thinks people want to hear, rather than what he truly believes. And about half of black voters said race relations would improve in an Obama administration, compared with 29 per cent of whites.

About 40 per cent of blacks said that McCain, if elected President, would favour whites over blacks should he win the election.

There was even racial dissension over Obama's wife, Michelle. She was viewed favourably by 58 per cent of black voters, compared with 24 per cent of white voters.