US refineries are clearly geared to gasoline production over diesel. Nobody runs a refinery to output a single product, but all refineries can easily and profitably slant their production to certain desired goals for output mix.
From this chart you can see that the lighter fractions do not typically amount to more than about 30 percent of the simple distillation (yes, crudes vary widely in what simple distillation yields), yet US refineries produce 47% gasoline. That's because they crack more of the heavy products to yield gasoline than they do to yield distillates like diesel.
eia.doe.gov
You can run the crackers (and all the various other refining mechanisms) to yield whatever mix you want, within reason (there are certainly limits on what you can do profitably, you are always going to have an output of a full range of products). Look at this chart, and you see that the US outputs a much larger percentage of gasoline, whereas the nearly all other refineries around the world output a larger percentage of distillate.
Refinery output mix is largely a matter of choice. The US has emphasized gasoline, and all their refineries are geared to produce as much gasoline as possible.
eia.doe.gov
"The quest to maximize gasoline production has been the driver in the development of refinery technology and design in the United States"
eia.doe.gov
"U.S. demand is centered on light products, such as gasoline. Refiners in the United States more closely match the mix of products demand by using downstream processing to move from the natural yield of products from simple distillation, to the U.S. demand slate. After simple distillation alone, the output from a crude oil like Arab Light would be about 20 percent of lightest, gasoline-like products, and about 50 percent of the heaviest, the residuum. After further processing in the most sophisticated refinery, however, the finished product output is about 60 percent gasoline, and 5 percent residuum."
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