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															SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															No. 22-807

															_________________

															THOMAS C. ALEXANDER, in his official capacity
as PRESIDENT OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA SENATE, et al., APPELLANTS v. THE SOUTH CAROLINA STATE CONFERENCE OF THE NAACP, et
al.

															on appeal from the united states district
court for the district of south carolina

															[May 23, 2024]

															Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the
Court.

															I

															The Constitution entrusts state legislatures
with the primary responsibility for drawing congressional
districts, and redistricting is an inescapably political
enterprise. Legislators are almost always aware of the political
ramifications of the maps they adopt, and claims that a map is
unconstitutional because it was drawn to achieve a partisan end are
not justiciable in federal court. Thus, as far as the Federal
Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends
when it engages in redistricting. By contrast, if a legislature
gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the
resulting map is subjected to strict scrutiny and may be held
unconstitutional.

															These doctrinal lines collide when race and
partisan preference are highly correlated. We have navigated this
tension by endorsing two related propositions. First, a party
challenging a map's constitutionality must disentangle race and
politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated
by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a
legislature's work, we start with a presumption that the
legislature acted in good faith.

															In this case, which features a challenge to
South Carolina's redistricting efforts in the wake of the 2020
census, the three-judge District Court paid only lip service to
these propositions. That misguided approach infected the District
Court's findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the
appropriate legal standard. We therefore reverse the trial court in
part and remand for further proceedings.

															II

															A

															Redistricting constitutes a traditional domain
of state legislative authority. See Moore v. Harper ,
600 U.S. 1 (2023); see also U. S. Const., Art. I, §4, cl. 1. The
Fourteenth Amendment introduces one constraint by prohibiting a
State from engaging in a racial gerrymander unless it can satisfy
strict scrutiny. But given “the complex interplay of forces that
enter a legislature's redistricting calculus,” we have repeatedly
emphasized that federal courts must “exercise extraordinary caution
in adjudicating claims that a State has drawn district lines on the
basis of race.” Miller v. Johnson , 515 U.S.
900 , 915-916 (1995). Such caution is necessary because
“[f]ederal-court review of districting legislation represents a
serious intrusion on the most vital of local functions.” Id. , at 915. To untangle race from other permissible
considerations, we require the plaintiff to show that race was the
“predominant factor motivating the legislature's decision to place
a significant number of voters within or without a particular
district.” Id. , at 916.

															To make that showing, a plaintiff must prove
that the State “subordinated” race-neutral districting criteria
such as compactness, contiguity, and core preservation to “racial
considerations.” Ibid. Racial considerations predominate
when “[r]ace was the criterion that, in the State's view, could not
be compromised” in the drawing of district lines.[ 1 ] Shaw v. Hunt , 517 U.S.
899 , 907 (1996). We have recognized that, “[a]s a practical
matter,” challengers will often need to show that the State's
chosen map conflicts with traditional redistricting criteria. Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections , 580
U.S. 178, 190 (2017). That is because it may otherwise “be
difficult for challengers to find other evidence sufficient to show
that race was the overriding factor causing neutral considerations
to be cast aside.” Ibid. This showing can be made through some
combination of direct and circumstantial evidence. See Cooper v. Harris , 581 U.S. 285, 291 (2017). Direct
evidence often comes in the form of a relevant state actor's
express acknowledgment that race played a role in the drawing of
district lines. Such concessions are not uncommon because States
often admit to considering race for the purpose of satisfying our
precedent interpreting the Voting Rights Act of 1965. See, e.g.,
Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, 575 U.S.
254, 259-260 (2015). Direct evidence can also be smoked out over
the course of litigation. In Cooper , for instance, we
offered the hypothetical example of a plaintiff finding “scores of
leaked e-mails from state officials instructing their mapmaker to
pack as many black voters as possible into a district.” 581 U. S.,
at 318. In such instances, if the State cannot satisfy strict
scrutiny, direct evidence of this sort amounts to a confession of
error.

															Proving racial predominance with circumstantial
evidence alone is much more difficult. Although we have never
invalidated an electoral map in a case in which the plaintiff
failed to adduce any direct evidence, we have, at least in theory,
kept the door open for those rare instances in which a district's
shape is “so bizarre on its face that it discloses a racial design”
absent any alternative explanation. Miller , 515 U. S., at
914; see also Shaw v. Reno , 509
U.S. 630 , 643-645 (1993) ( Shaw I ).

															A circumstantial-evidence-only case is
especially difficult when the State raises a
partisan-gerrymandering defense. That is because partisan and
racial gerrymanders “are capable of yielding similar oddities in a
district's boundaries” when there is a high correlation between
race and partisan preference. Cooper , 581 U. S., at 308. And
that is the situation in this case, as the 2020 Presidential
election illustrated. Exit polls found that at least 90% of black
voters voted for the Democratic candidate in South Carolina and
throughout the Nation.[ 2 ] When
partisanship and race correlate, it naturally follows that a map
that has been gerrymandered to achieve a partisan end can look very
similar to a racially gerrymandered map. For that reason, “[o]ur
prior decisions have made clear that a jurisdiction may engage in
constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that
the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if
the State were conscious of that fact.” Hunt v. Cromartie , 526 U.S.
541 , 551 (1999) ( Cromartie I ); see also Rucho v. Common Cause , 588 U.S. 684, 721 (2019) (concluding that
federal judges lack the license to evaluate partisan-gerrymandering
claims). We have noted that a State's partisan-gerrymandering
defense therefore raises “special challenges” for plaintiffs. Cooper , 581 U. S., at 308. To prevail, a plaintiff must
“disentangle race from politics” by proving “that the former drove a district's lines.” Ibid. (emphasis added).
That means, among other things, ruling out the competing
explanation that political considerations dominated the
legislature's redistricting efforts. If either politics or race
could explain a district's contours, the plaintiff has not cleared
its bar.

															Our decision in Easley v. Cromartie, 532 U.S.
234 (2001) ( Cromartie II ), illustrates the difficulties
that plaintiffs must overcome in this context. There, the
plaintiffs' case hinged on circumstantial evidence of a racial
gerrymander such as expert testimony and discrepancies between the
relevant district lines and traditional districting criteria. Id. , at 240-241; see also Cooper , 581 U. S., at 321
(describing the direct evidence in Cromartie II as
“extremely weak”). After the State asserted a
partisan-gerrymandering defense, we faulted the plaintiffs for
failing to show “that the legislature could have achieved its
legitimate political objectives in alternative ways that are
comparably consistent with traditional districting principles.” Cromartie II , 532 U. S., at 258. In other words, the
plaintiffs failed to meet the high bar for a racial-gerrymandering
claim by failing to produce, among other things, an alternative map
showing that a rational legislature sincerely driven by its
professed partisan goals would have drawn a different map with
greater racial balance. Since our decision in Cromartie II ,
any plaintiff with a strong case has had every incentive to produce
such an alternative map.

															Without an alternative map, it is difficult for
plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature
acted in good faith. This presumption of legislative good faith
directs district courts to draw the inference that cuts in the
legislature's favor when confronted with evidence that could
plausibly support multiple conclusions. See, e.g., Abbott v. Perez , 585 U.S. 579, 610-612 (2018). This approach ensures
that “race for its own sake, and not other districting principles,
was the legislature's dominant and controlling rationale in drawing
its district lines.” Miller , 515 U. S., at 913; see also Cromartie I , 526 U. S., at 546 (noting that strict scrutiny
is warranted when a map is “unexplainable on grounds other than
race” (internal quotation marks omitted)).

															Three additional reasons justify this
presumption. First, this presumption reflects the Federal
Judiciary's due respect for the judgment of state legislators, who
are similarly bound by an oath to follow the Constitution. Second,
when a federal court finds that race drove a legislature's
districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged
in “offensive and demeaning” conduct, Miller , 515 U. S., at
912, that “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political
apartheid,” Shaw I , 509 U. S., at 647. We should not be
quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches. Third, we
must be wary of plaintiffs who seek to transform federal courts
into “weapons of political warfare” that will deliver victories
that eluded them “in the political arena.” Cooper , 581 U.
S., at 335 (Alito, J., concurring in judgment in part and
dissenting in part). The presumption of good faith furthers each of
these constitutional interests. It also explains why we have held
that the plaintiff 's evidentiary burden in these cases is
especially stringent. See Cromartie II , 532 U. S., at
241.

															If a plaintiff can demonstrate that race drove
the mapping of district lines, then the burden shifts to the State
to prove that the map can overcome the daunting requirements of
strict scrutiny. Under this standard, we begin by asking whether
the State's decision to sort voters on the basis of race furthers a
compelling governmental interest. Cooper , 581 U. S., at 292.
We then determine whether the State's use of race is “narrowly
tailored”— i.e. , “necessary”—to achieve that interest. This
standard is extraordinarily onerous because the Fourteenth
Amendment was designed to eradicate race-based state action. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and
Fellows of Harvard College , 600 U.S. 181, 206 (2023).

															B

															South Carolina has seven congressional
districts, and this case concerns two of them, Districts 1 and 6.
District 1 covers the State's southeast region, while District 6
covers its southwest and central regions. South Carolina's prior
map, which was enacted in 2011, split several counties between
Districts 1 and 6, including Beaufort, Berkeley, Charleston,
Colleton, and Dorchester Counties. See Figure 1, infra , at
11. The Department of Justice precleared the 2011 map, and a
three-judge District Court upheld it against racial-gerrymandering
and intentional vote-dilution claims after finding that the
legislature “demonstrate[d] that [it] adhered to traditional
race-neutral principles.” Backus v. South Carolina ,
857 F. Supp. 2d 553, 560 (SC), summarily aff 'd, 568 U.S. 801
(2012). The relevant part of that map is shown in Figure 1, infra , at 11.

															Over the next decade, the 2011 map consistently
yielded a 6-to-1 Republican-Democratic delegation—with one
exception. In 2018, the Democratic candidate, with 50.7% of the
votes, narrowly won District 1, which had previously elected
Republican candidates.[ 3 ] But
in 2020, when the Republican Presidential candidate handily won the
State, the Republican congressional candidate retook District 1 by
a slender margin, winning 50.6% of the votes.[ 4 ]

															South Carolina had to redraw its map after the
2020 census because two of the State's seven districts saw major
population shifts. District 1 was overpopulated by 87,689 residents
while District 6 was underpopulated by 84,741 residents. South
Carolina therefore had to add voters to District 6 while
subtracting voters from District 1 in order to comply with the
principle of one person, one vote. The remaining districts also had
to be modified in order to bring the whole map into compliance with
that requirement.

															In September 2021, the Senate subcommittee
tasked with drawing the new map issued guidance explaining that
traditional districting principles, such as respect for contiguity
and incumbent protection, would guide the mapmaking process along
with the strict equal-population requirement. At the same time, the
Republican-controlled legislature also made it clear that it would
aim to create a stronger Republican tilt in District 1. Senate
Majority Leader Shane Massey, for instance, testified at trial that
partisanship was “one of the most important factors” in the process
and that the Republican Party was “not going to pass a plan that
sacrificed [District 1].” J. S. A. 265a. As he put it, the
legislature's adoption of any map that improved the Democrats'
chance of reclaiming District 1 would constitute “political
malpractice.” Id., at 276a. Contemporaneous evidence
confirms that leaders in the legislature sought to “create a
stronger Republican tilt” in District 1 while “honoring” other
race-neutral, traditional districting criteria. 649 F. Supp. 3d
177, 187 (SC 2023); J. S. A. 333a-334a.

															To draw its maps, the Senate turned to Will
Roberts, a nonpartisan staffer with 20 years of experience in state
government. Roberts had “worked with the three-judge panel in Backus ” and had routinely prepared “reapportionment plans
for counties, cities[,] and school boards across the state.” 649 F.
Supp. 3d, at 188. During the trial of this case, one of the judges
praised Roberts' expertise and honesty on the record.[ 5 ] Under the Senate's open-door policy,
Roberts drew maps upon request for Republican and Democratic
Senators alike. In making these maps, Roberts relied on political
data from the 2020 Presidential election along with traditional
districting criteria and input from various lawmakers, including
Representative Jim Clyburn, whose recommendations would have
preserved the strong Democratic tilt in his district (District 6)
and included a version of District 1 with a black voting-age
population (BVAP) of 15.48%. J. S. A. 127a.

															The eventual map (Enacted Plan), see Figure 2, infra , at 12, differed from the 2011 map in three important
respects that reflected the legislature's priorities. First, the
Enacted Plan unified Beaufort and Berkeley Counties within District
1. This move enhanced the Republican advantage in District 1
because the moved-in portions of those counties leaned Republican.
Second, to further increase the Republican lead in District 1,
Roberts also put more of Dorchester County in District 1. These
changes exacerbated the population imbalance between District 1 and
District 6. Third, to cure this problem, Roberts moved a series of
precincts in Charleston from District 1 to District 6. In keeping
with the legislature's partisan objectives, the precincts moved out
of District 1 had a 58.8% Democratic vote share.

															By design, the legislature divided Charleston
between Districts 1 and 6. This split was seen as in Charleston's
best interests because it meant that the county would have two
Representatives in the House—one Democrat, Representative Clyburn,
who has represented District 6 since 1993 and has held important
House leadership positions, and one Republican representing
District 1. Republican Senator Chip Campsen, who spearheaded the
mapmaking process, testified that Charleston benefits from
bipartisan congressional representation on “bread-and-butter
things” like port maintenance and “influence with the incumbent
administration.” Id., at 338a. As he explained, “I am
tickled to death that Jim Clyburn represents Charleston County,” id ., at 371a, because “Clyburn has more influence with the
Biden Administration perhaps than anyone in the nation,” id ., at 338a. To achieve all these objectives, Roberts moved
roughly 193,000 residents between the districts with a net
migration of 87,690 people into District 6. Id ., at 439a,
443a.

															The Enacted Map achieved the legislature's
political goal by increasing District 1's projected Republican vote
share by 1.36% to 54.39%. The version of District 1 in the Enacted
Plan also had a slightly higher BVAP, rising from 16.56% to 16.72%.
The legislature voted to adopt the Enacted Plan, and the Governor
signed it into law in January 2022.

															While the Enacted Map was still in the making,
the plaintiff-appellees in this case—the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Taiwan Scott, a voter
in District 1 (collectively, the Challengers)—sued to contest the
2011 map on the ground that, in light of the 2020 census, it
violated the one person, one vote requirement. After South Carolina
passed the Enacted Plan, the Challengers amended their complaint to
attack that map instead. The Challengers alleged that Districts 1,
2, and 5 were racially gerrymandered and that these districts
diluted the electoral power of the State's black voters. A
three-judge District Court rejected these claims with respect to
Districts 2 and 5. But the court held that South Carolina drew
District 1 with a 17% BVAP “target” in mind and that this violated
the Equal Protection Clause. For similar reasons, the court also
found that the State's putative use of race to draw District 1
unlawfully diluted the black vote. The court permanently enjoined
South Carolina from conducting elections in District 1 until it
approved a new map. The State appealed to this Court, and we noted
probable jurisdiction. 598 U. S. ___ (2023).

															III

															The State contends that the District Court
committed both legal error and clear factual error in concluding
that race played a predominant role in the legislature's design of
District 1. The State's principal legal argument is that the
District Court did not properly disentangle race from politics.
Because this argument, at bottom, attacks the factual basis of the
District Court's findings, we dispose of this case on clear-error
grounds.

															Under our case law, the Challengers bore the
burden of showing that the “legislature subordinated traditional
race-neutral districting principles . . . to racial
considerations.” Miller , 515 U. S., at 916. In this case,
the District Court clearly erred because the Challengers did not
meet this “demanding” standard. Id. , at 928 (O'Connor, J.,
concurring). They provided no direct evidence of a racial
gerrymander, and their circumstantial evidence is very weak.
Instead, the Challengers relied on deeply flawed expert reports.
And while these experts produced tens of thousands of maps with
differently configured districts, they did not offer a single map
that achieved the legislature's partisan goal while including a
higher BVAP in District 1. Faced with this record, we must reverse
the District Court on the racial-gerrymandering claim.

															We divide our analysis into four parts. First,
we set out the appropriate legal standard for reviewing a district
court's factual findings in racial-gerrymandering cases. Second, we
explain why the District Court's factual findings are clearly
flawed with respect to the Challengers' circumstantial evidence.
Third, we examine the four expert reports that the Challengers
presented below. And finally, we explain that the District Court
erred by not drawing an adverse inference from the Challengers'
failure to submit an alternative map that would have allowed the
State to achieve its districting goals while maintaining a higher
BVAP in District 1.

															A

															We review the District Court's factual
findings for clear error. That means we may not set those findings
aside unless, after examining the entire record, we are “left with
the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been
committed.” Cooper , 581 U. S., at 309 (internal quotation
marks omitted). This is a demanding test, but it is not a rubber
stamp.

															Moreover, in a case like this, there is a
special danger that a misunderstanding of what the law requires may
infect what is labeled a finding of fact. “[I]f [a] trial court
bases its findings upon a mistaken impression of applicable legal
principles, the reviewing court is not bound by the clearly
erroneous standard.” Inwood Laboratories, Inc. v. Ives
Laboratories, Inc. , 456 U.S.
844 , 855, n. 15 (1982); see also Abbott , 585 U. S., at
607. Here, the standard of proof that the three-judge court was
required to apply, i.e. , the racial-predominance test, has a
very substantial legal component that must take account of our
prior relevant decisions.[ 6 ]
And the application of this test calls for particular care when the
defense contends that the driving force in its critical districting
decisions (namely, partisanship) was a factor that is closely
correlated with race. Thus, in a case like this, we must exercise
special care in reviewing the relevant findings of fact.

															B

															The District Court found that South Carolina
drew District 1 with a racial “target,” namely, the maintenance of
a 17% BVAP, and it concluded that this deliberate use of race
rendered District 1's lines unlawful. See Bethune-Hill , 580
U. S., at 183-185. But the Challengers did not offer any direct
evidence to support that conclusion, and indeed, the direct
evidence that is in the record is to the contrary. Roberts, the
non-partisan career employee who drew the Enacted Map, testified
that he used only political data, and his colleagues likewise
steadfastly denied using race in drawing the Enacted Map. None of
the facts on which the District Court relied to infer a racial
motive is sufficient to support an inference that can overcome the
presumption of legislative good faith. First , the District Court inferred a
racial motive from the fact that District 1's BVAP stayed around
17% “[d]espite all of th[e] changes” that South Carolina made
during the redistricting process. 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 191. But
where race and partisan preferences are very closely tied, as they
are here, the mere fact that District 1's BVAP stayed more or less
constant proves very little. If 100% of black voters voted for
Democratic candidates, it is obvious that any map with the partisan
breakdown that the legislature sought in District 1—something in
the range of 54% Republican to 46% Democratic—would inevitably
involve the removal of a disproportionate number of black voters.
And since roughly 90% of black voters cast their ballots for
Democratic candidates, the same phenomenon is very likely.

															The District Court's own findings substantiate
the tight correlation between the legislature's partisan aim and
District 1's BVAP. During the redistricting process, the State
considered a variety of maps, including those submitted by the
Challengers. Maps with a Democratic-leaning District 1 had BVAP
percentages that generally ranged between 21% to 24%. See App. 83;
J. S. A. Supp. 142a. The District Court itself concluded that a 17%
BVAP “produced a Republican tilt,” a 20% BVAP “produced a ‘toss up
district,' ” and a 21% to 24% BVAP “produced a Democratic tilt.”
649 F. Supp. 3d, at 188. And the Challengers cannot point to even
one map in the record that would have satisfied the legislature's
political aim and had a BVAP above 17%. Thus, there is strong
evidence that the district's BVAP of 17% was simply a side effect
of the legislature's partisan goal. And certainly nothing rules out
that possibility. In light of the presumption of legislative good
faith, that possibility is dispositive.

															The District Court's reasoning, however, is
flatly inconsistent with that presumption. And what the court
did—inferring bad faith based on the racial effects of a political
gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference
are very closely correlated—would, if accepted, provide a
convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep
our holding in Rucho that partisan- gerrymandering claims
are not justiciable in federal court. Under the District Court's
reasoning, a litigant could repackage a partisan-gerrymandering
claim as a racial- gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight
link between race and political preference. Instead of claiming
that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic
breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan
data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a
particular BVAP target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such
ease. For that reason, the District Court clearly erred in finding
that the legislature deliberately sought to maintain a particular
BVAP just because the maps that produced the sought-after partisan
goal all had roughly the same BVAP. Second , the District Court inferred a
racial motive from certain changes that the State made in redrawing
District 1, namely, the Enacted Plan moved more voters out of
District 1 (approximately 140,000) than were needed to comply with
the one person, one vote rule (about 88,000), and the Enacted Plan
split Charleston and a few other counties even though the avoidance
of such splits is a traditional redistricting objective. But here,
again, the State's avowed partisan objective easily explains these
facts. The State claims it sought to ensure that District 1 had a
reliable Republican majority, and simply removing 88,000 voters
without regard to their party preferences would not have satisfied
that objective. Similarly, the high priority that the legislature
gave to its partisan goal provides an entirely reasonable
explanation for the subordination of other objectives such as the
avoidance of county splits. See Cooper , 581 U. S., at 308
(“[P]olitical and racial [gerrymanders] are capable of yielding
similar oddities in a district's boundaries”). Third , the District Court found it
telling that many predominantly black Charleston precincts were
moved out of District 1 and into District 6. But because of the
tight correlation between race and partisan preferences, this fact
does little to show that race, not politics, drove the
legislature's choice. The Charleston County precincts that were
removed are 58.8% Democratic. Thus, the legislature's stated
partisan goal can easily explain this decision, and the District
Court therefore erred in crediting the less charitable conclusion
that the legislature's real aim was racial. Fourth , the District Court placed too
much weight on the fact that several legislative staffers,
including Roberts, viewed racial data at some point during the
redistricting process. This acknowledgment means little on its own
because we expect that “[r]edistricting legislatures will . . .
almost always be aware of racial demographics.” Miller , 515
U. S., at 916. Here, Roberts testified without contradiction that
he considered the relevant racial data only after he had
drawn the Enacted Map and that he generated that data solely for a
lawful purpose, namely, to check that the maps he produced complied
with our Voting Rights Act precedent. J. S. A. 92a, 205a, 379a.

															The District Court discredited this testimony,
but it cited no evidence that could not also support the inference
that politics drove the mapmaking process. And the court provided
no explanation why a mapmaker who wanted to produce a version of
District 1 that would be safely Republican would use data about
voters' race rather than their political preferences. Why would
Roberts have used racial data—with the associated legal risks—as a
proxy for partisan data when he had access to refined,
sub-precinct-level political data that accounted for voter turnout
and electoral preferences? The District Court provided no answer to
this obvious question.[ 7 ]

															The Challengers look to plug this gap by arguing
that Roberts must have used racial data because the political data
he claimed to have used was blatantly unsatisfactory. For support,
they cite the testimony of Dale Oldham, a political consultant who
did not participate in drawing the Enacted Plan. Oldham testified
that he believed the standard data South Carolina used for
measuring partisanship is unreliable because it does not accurately
reflect the partisan preferences of absentee voters. Oldham opined
that a new type of composite data that first became available in
2020 does a better job in that regard. J. S. A. Supp. 417a-418a,
420a.

															This criticism is entitled to little weight. One
consultant's opinion about the quality of South Carolina's
political data obviously does not settle the question whether the
State's political data was inferior. And in any event, the relevant
question is not whether the State used the best available data but
whether it is reasonable to infer that the mapmakers' political
data was so obviously flawed that they must have surreptitiously
used racial data. Oldham's testimony falls far short of
establishing that the State cannot plausibly have believed that its
own political data was sufficient. Nothing in our case law requires
the State to adopt novel methodologies in analyzing election data.
Indeed, the State plausibly argues that its data was more than good
enough for its purposes because it showed partisan preferences at
the sub-precinct level and also accounted for variations in voter
turnout. Reply Brief 9, 11; J. S. A. 93a.

															In sum, the District Court's heavy reliance on
these four pieces of evidence was seriously misguided in light of
the appropriate legal standard and our repeated instructions that a
court in a case such as this must rule out the possibility that
politics drove the districting process.

															C

															Once these weak inferences are set aside, all
that the Challengers have left are four expert reports. But these
reports are flawed because they “ignored certain traditional
districting criteria” such as geographical constraints and the
legislature's partisan interests. Allen v. Milligan ,
599 U.S. 1, 34 (2023). Because these reports do not replicate the
“myriad considerations” that a legislature must balance as part of
its redistricting efforts, they cannot sustain a finding that race
played a predominant role in the drawing of District 1's lines. Id. , at 35. We will discuss each of the Challengers' four
experts in turn. Dr. Kosuke Imai . The report of the
Challengers' first expert, Dr. Kosuke Imai, provides no support for
the decision below because Dr. Imai made no effort to disentangle
race from politics. Dr. Imai developed a computer algorithm that
generated 20,000 maps of the State's congressional districts that
complied with the one person, one vote rule. This algorithm did not
take race into account, and it sought to respect traditional
redistricting objectives such as contiguity and compactness. The
Challengers assert that these maps prove that race drove the
State's redistricting process because the average District 1 in
these simulations contained a higher BVAP than the District 1 in
the Enacted Plan.

															The Challengers' inference is flawed because Dr.
Imai's models failed to consider partisanship. See J. S. A. Supp.
30a (acknowledging that “no race or partisan information was
used” (emphasis added)). That is a fatal omission in this case. As
noted, race and politics strongly correlate in South Carolina, and
Dr. Imai's algorithm produced maps without requiring that District
1 comply with the legislature's asserted aim of ensuring that
District 1 remain a relatively safe Republican seat. The effect of
Dr. Imai's omission can be seen by looking at the Democratic vote
share (measured by the results in the 2020 Presidential election)
in the versions of District 1 that his simulations produced.
President Biden's vote share in the average District 1 in Dr.
Imai's maps was significantly higher than his vote share in the
version of District 1 in the Enacted Plan. Rebuttal Report of Sean
Trende in South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McMaster , No. 3:21-cv-3302 (D SC, Aug. 19, 2022), ECF Doc.
323-33, pp. 5-6. Indeed, Dr. Sean Trende, the State's expert,
showed that District 1 would have voted for the Democratic nominee
in 2020 in 91% of Dr. Imai's simulations. Ibid. Because Dr.
Imai's model fails to track the considerations that governed the
legislature's redistricting decision, it is irrelevant that the
racial makeup of District 1 in his maps differs from that in the
version of the district in the Enacted Plan.

															It is also noteworthy that Dr. Imai could have
easily controlled for partisan preferences just as he controlled
for other redistricting factors such as compactness and county
splits. He could have generated maps conditioned on District 1's
vote share matching or exceeding the Benchmark Plan's Republican
tilt. But he did not take that obvious step.

															The Challengers seek to excuse their failures to
disentangle race and politics by arguing that South Carolina raised
a partisan-gerrymandering defense for the first time during the
trial, but this argument rests on the implausible premise that the
Challengers were unaware of the legislature's partisan concerns
during the mapmaking process. The fact of the matter is that
politics pervaded the highly visible mapmaking process from start
to finish. The Republican and Democratic caucuses submitted
competing maps, and the Enacted Plan passed the legislature by a
margin of 26 to 15 in the Senate and 72 to 33 in the House, with
only Democrats voting in opposition. The public hearings and
legislative debates are of a piece. For example, Senator Margie
Bright Matthews, a black Democrat, said in a floor debate with
Senator Campsen that “ ‘we're not going to get into the racial
gerrymandering thing because you and I both know in Charleston it
matters not about your race. It is just that you went by how those
folks voted.' ” App. 296. For evidence, she recognized that the
Enacted Plan also moved into District 6 predominantly white parts
of Charleston that skewed Democratic, such as West Ashley. She
added, “ ‘Senator [Campsen], . . . I really appreciate you agreeing
with me that our opposition . . . is not about racial
[gerrymandering].' ” Ibid . Instead, she said, it was about “
‘packing' ” the Democratic-voting area of Charleston into District
6 “ ‘to make [District 1] more electable.' ” Ibid. Former
Congressman Cunningham, the Democrat who represented District 1
from 2018 to 2020, also criticized the Enacted Plan's District 1
lines as “ ‘mak[ing] no sense unless, of course, the sole purpose . . . is to make it harder for a Republican to lose.' ” Id., at 295. He added that “the folks in Washington, D.C.,”
did not want a repeat of the 2018 election or even the 2020
election where he lost against the Republican nominee by “a single
point in one of the closest elections in the entire country.” Ibid. Under these circumstances, it is safe to say that the
Challengers were on notice that the State would raise a
partisan-gerrymandering defense at trial.

															Dr. Imai's conspicuous failure to control for
party preference is alone sufficient to discredit any reliance on
his report, but his report exhibited another serious flaw: it
failed to consider “core district retention,” a term that “refers
to the proportion of districts that remain when a State transitions
from one districting plan to another.” Allen , 599 U. S., at
21. The Enacted Plan retains 83% of District 1's core, but the
average map produced by Dr. Imai's model scored 69% on the
core-district-retention metric—three standard deviations lower. ECF
Doc. 323-33, at 5.

															Dr. Imai's failure to consider core retention
betrays a blinkered view of the redistricting process. Lawmakers do
not typically start with a blank slate; rather, they usually begin
with the existing map and make alterations to fit various
districting goals. Core retention recognizes this reality. Dr. Imai
could have controlled for this metric by restricting the core
retention in his simulations to at least 83%. His failure to do so
here means we cannot rule out core retention as another plausible
explanation for the difference between the Enacted Plan and the
average Imai simulation. Dr. Jordan Ragusa . As evidence that race
predominated in District 1's design, the District Court also
credited a report by Dr. Jordan Ragusa, another expert for the
Challengers. Unlike Dr. Imai, Dr. Ragusa attempted to disentangle
race from politics, but as we will explain, his analysis has at
least two serious defects. First, he failed to account for two key
mapmaking factors: contiguity and compactness. Second, he used an
inferior method of measuring a precinct's partisan leanings.

															We begin with the matter of contiguity and
compactness. Dr. Ragusa used three separate models, but none of
them controlled for these critical districting factors. Two of his
models employed the so-called county envelope approach. Using this
approach, he first identified the five counties that have at least
one precinct that fell within District 1 in the Benchmark Plan.
These counties in their entirety constituted the “county
envelope.”

															Dr. Ragusa employed a method that we will
discuss below to control for the partisan preferences of voters in
these precincts, and he also controlled for precinct size. He then
asked whether a precinct of a given size with a given partisan
breakdown was more or less likely to be included in District 1
depending on its racial demographics, and he reported that
districts with a high percentage of black voters were more likely
to be excluded.

															His remaining model looked only at the precincts
that were in District 1 in the Benchmark Plan, and controlling in
the same way for size and partisan leaning, he reported that a
precinct was more likely to be moved out if it had a high
percentage of black voters.

															All three of these models exhibit the same flaw.
Because they did not control for contiguity or compactness, they
all assume that a precinct could be moved into or out of District 1
regardless of its distance from the line between that district and
District 6. That is highly unrealistic. A simple example
illustrates this point in relation to the county envelope approach,
as can be seen with a quick look at Figure 1, which we again
reproduce below.

															Under Dr. Ragusa's methodology, any
precinct in Colleton County could have been moved into District
1, but many precincts in that county are nowhere near District 1's
outer boundaries. For example, precincts near the county's northern
border with Bamberg County could not have been moved into District
1 without egregiously flouting the State's important interests in
contiguity or compactness. And the same problem arises with respect
to the question whether a precinct in District 1 in the Benchmark
Plan could have been moved into District 6. Precincts in District 1
that are not close to the district line could not have been moved
without making District 6 less contiguous or compact.[ 8 ]

															We have already rejected a plaintiff 's expert
report for failing to account for this feature of mapmaking. In Cromartie II , we faulted the plaintiff 's expert for failing
to consider whether the excluded precincts “were located near
enough to [the district's] boundaries or each other for the
legislature as a practical matter to have drawn [the district's]
boundaries to have included them, without sacrificing other
important political goals.” 532 U. S., at 247. The District Court
clearly erred in crediting Dr. Ragusa's models because his approach
made that same mistake.

															Dr. Ragusa's report also carries less weight
because of how he measured a precinct's partisan leanings. Using
the results of the 2020 Presidential election, Dr. Ragusa measured
partisan tilt by looking at the total votes cast for
President Biden, not the net votes for President Biden. This
method fails to account for the fact that voter turnout may vary
significantly from precinct to precinct, and therefore a precinct
in which a candidate gets a large number of votes may also be a
precinct in which the candidate fails to win a majority. To
illustrate this point, consider this simplified example:

															Dr. Ragusa's model considers only the total
number of Biden votes in its partisanship analysis. J. S. A. 502a.
But legislators aiming to make District 1 a relatively safe
Republican seat would be foolish to exclude Precinct 2 merely
because it has more Democratic votes than Precinct 1. Instead, they
would look at the net Democratic votes and would thus remove
Precinct 1, not Precinct 2. Although the use of total votes may be
a statistically permissible measure of partisan lean, it is
undoubtedly preferable for an expert report to rely on net votes
when measuring a district's partisan lean.

															The Challengers seek to defend Dr. Ragusa's
report by suggesting that he followed the same methodology as
Professor Stephen Ansolabehere, whose report we blessed in Cooper , 581 U. S., at 315, but that is wrong. There are
important differences between Dr. Ragusa's methodology and
Professor Ansolabehere's,[ 9 ]
and in all events, Professor Ansolabehere's report played a minor
role in Cooper , where the plaintiffs could also point to
direct evidence. Here, by contrast, once the District Court's other
circumstantial findings are set aside, the Challengers must rest
their entire case on these expert reports. Dr. Ragusa's report, on
its own, cannot prove that District 1's lines are “unexplainable on
grounds other than race.” Shaw I , 509 U. S., at 644
(internal quotation marks omitted). Dr. Baodong Liu . Dr. Baodong Liu, another
of the Challengers' experts, submitted a report that purported to
show that race rather than politics explains District 1's design.
Although the District Court did not cite Dr. Liu's report, the
Challengers contend that it bolsters the District Court's findings.
Tr. of Oral Arg. 86-87. But Dr. Liu's methodology was plainly
flawed.

															First, his methodology, like Dr. Ragusa's,
failed to account for contiguity and compactness. Dr. Liu examined
all voters living within the county envelope for District 1 of the
Enacted Plan to see which voters were more likely to have been
excluded. His analysis suggested that black Democrats were more
likely to have been excluded than white Democrats.

															This methodology was highly unrealistic because
it treated each voter as an independent unit that South Carolina
could include or exclude from District 1. No mapmaker who respects
contiguity and compactness could take such an approach. For
example, a mapmaker could not assign a black Republican to one
district while moving a black Democrat who lives in the same
apartment building to another district. To accurately reflect the
districting process, an analysis would have to pay attention to
whether a voter's neighbors were moved too.

															This defect alone is sufficient to preclude
reliance on Dr. Liu's report, but that report exhibited another
flaw: it used inferior data to measure a district's partisan tilt.
While the State used voting data from the 2020 Presidential
election , Dr. Liu relied on data from the 2018 gubernatorial
primaries . Data from that gubernatorial primary is less
informative because far fewer voters turn out for off-cycle
gubernatorial primary elections. The numbers prove the point. In
the 2018 elections, a total of about 610,000 votes were cast across
both primaries; in the 2020 Presidential election, by contrast, a
total of 2.5 million votes were cast.[ 10 ] Because Dr. Liu examined only a small, highly
non-random sample of the regular voting electorate, we cannot say
that the same results would hold true if he had applied his
methodology to the State's 2020 data. Dr. Moon Duchin . Dr. Moon Duchin, the
final expert put forward by the Challengers, provided a report
assessing whether the Enacted Plan “cracks” black voters among
multiple districts in a way that produced “discernible vote
dilution.” J. S. A. Supp. 127a. After finding that the Enacted Plan
diluted the black vote, Dr. Duchin concluded that it is “not
plausible” that the dilution was a mere “side effect of partisan
concerns.” Id ., at 175a.

															Neither the District Court nor the Challengers
cite Dr. Duchin's report to support the racial-predominance
finding, and that is for a good reason. Like Dr. Imai's report,
various parts of Dr. Duchin's report did not account for
partisanship or core retention. App. 102-103. Moreover, Dr.
Duchin's conclusion was based on an assessment of the map as a
whole rather than District 1 in particular. A state-wide analysis
cannot show that District 1 was drawn based on race. See Bethune-Hill , 580 U. S., at 191 (“[T]he basic unit of
analysis for racial gerrymandering claims . . . is the district”); Alabama Legislative Black Caucus , 575 U. S., at 262-263 (a
racial-gerrymandering claim “does not apply to a State considered
as an undifferentiated ‘whole' ”). Given these serious problems, it
is no wonder that the challengers cite Dr. Duchin's report only in
support of their racial vote-dilution claim. It has no probative
force with respect to their racial-gerrymandering claim regarding
District 1's boundaries.

															To sum up our analysis so far, no direct
evidence supports the District Court's finding that race
predominated in the design of District 1 in the Enacted Plan. The
circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race, not
partisan preferences, drove the districting process, and none of
the expert reports offered by the Challengers provides any
significant support for their position. [ 11 ]

															D

															In addition to all this, the District Court
also critically erred by failing to draw an adverse inference
against the Challengers for not providing a substitute map that
shows how the State “could have achieved its legitimate political
objectives” in District 1 while producing “significantly greater
racial balance.” Cromartie II , 532 U. S., at 258. We have
repeatedly observed that an alternative map of this sort can go a
long way toward helping plaintiffs disentangle race and politics.
In Cooper , we expressed “no doubt that an alternative
districting plan . . . can serve as key evidence in a
race-versus-politics dispute.” 581 U. S., at 317. By showing that a
rational legislature, driven only by its professed mapmaking
criteria, could have produced a different map with “greater racial
balance,” Cromartie II , 532 U. S., at 258, an alternative
map can perform the critical task of distinguishing between racial
and political motivations when race and partisanship are closely
entwined. For that reason, we have said that when all plaintiffs
can muster is “meager direct evidence of a racial gerrymander”
“only [an alternative] ma[p] of that kind” can “carry the day.” Cooper , 581 U. S., at 322.

															Nor is an alternative map difficult to produce.
Any expert armed with a computer “can easily churn out
redistricting maps that control for any number of specified
criteria, including prior voting patterns and political party
registration.” Id. , at 337 (opinion of Alito, J.). The
Challengers enlisted four experts who could have made these
maps at little marginal cost. Dr. Imai's simulations generated
20,000 different maps—but none that actually controlled for
politics. The evidentiary force of an alternative map, coupled with
its easy availability, means that trial courts should draw an
adverse inference from a plaintiff 's failure to submit one. The
adverse inference may be dispositive in many, if not most, cases
where the plaintiff lacks direct evidence or some extraordinarily
powerful circumstantial evidence such as the “strangely irregular
twenty-eight-sided” district lines in Gomillion v. Lightfoot , 364 U.S.
339 , 341 (1960), which betrayed the State's aim of segregating
voters on the basis of race with “mathematical” precision, ibid .

															The District Court, however, misunderstood our
case law when it held that an alternative map is relevant only for
the purpose of showing that a remedy is plausible. 49 F. Supp 3d,
at 198-199. Because “a constitutionally compliant plan for
[District 1] can be designed without undue difficulty,” the
District Court concluded that it was “not necessary for Plaintiffs
to present an acceptable alternative map to prevail on their
claims.” Id ., at 199. That is wrong. A plaintiff 's failure
to submit an alternative map—precisely because it can be designed
with ease—should be interpreted by district courts as an implicit
concession that the plaintiff cannot draw a map that undermines the
legislature's defense that the districting lines were “based on a
permissible, rather than a prohibited, ground.” Cooper , 581
U. S., at 317. The District Court's conclusions are clearly
erroneous because it did not follow this basic logic.

															E

															Despite its length, the dissent boils down to
six main points. None is valid. First , the dissent suggests that
clear-error review is a perfunctory task, see post , at 10,
but that is not so. While district court findings of fact are
generally correct, conscientious district courts sometimes err, and
appellants are entitled to meaningful appellate review. Does the
dissent really think that all district court findings on the
question of racial discrimination are virtually immune from
reversal? Second , the dissent attacks the
proposition that in redistricting cases the “good faith of [the]
state legislature must be presumed.” Miller , 515 U. S., at
915. But, as the citation to Justice Kennedy's opinion for the
Court in Miller reveals, that presumption is an established
feature of our case law. Third , the dissent claims that our
decision is inconsistent with Cooper , but the dissent's
argument is based on an imaginary version of that opinion. Nothing
in Cooper is inconsistent with the venerable rule that a
factfinder may draw an adverse inference when a party fails to
produce highly probative evidence that it could readily obtain if
in fact such evidence exists. See Interstate Circuit, Inc. v. United States , 306 U.S.
208 , 226 (1939); see also 2 J. Wigmore, Evidence in Trials at
Common Law §291, pp. 227-229 (Chadbourn rev. 1979). “[T]his rule
can be traced as far back as 1722” and “has been utilized in scores
of modern cases .” International Union, United Auto, Aerospace
and Agricultural Implement Workers of Am. (UAW) v. NLRB ,
459 F.2d 1329, 1336 (CADC 1972). The dissent is correct that this
inference “pack[s] a wallop” in such cases, post , at 10, but
that is only because an adequate alternative map is remarkably easy
to produce—as demonstrated by the fact that the Challengers
introduced tens of thousands of other maps into the record. Under
such circumstances, if a sophisticated plaintiff bringing a
racial-gerrymandering claim cannot provide an alternative map, that
is most likely because such a map cannot be created. It would be
clear error for the factfinder to overlook this shortcoming. Fourth , the dissent argues that the
Challengers were blindsided when the State argued at trial that its
map was drawn to achieve a political goal. Post , at 13-14.
But there is ample evidence that the State's aim was well known
before trial. See supra , at 21-22. And neither the
Challengers nor the dissent can explain why the Challengers'
experts, who created thousands of maps that took into account all
sorts of variables, supposedly never even tried to create a
District 1 that had a higher BVAP while achieving the legislature's
political goals. Nor can they explain why, if such a map can be
created, the Challengers' experts did not produce one during the
trial. Fifth , the dissent makes much of the fact
that Roberts had taken racial demographics into account in drawing
maps in the past and was aware of the racial makeup of the various
districts he created in this case. But there is nothing nefarious
about his awareness of the State's racial demographics. Roberts has
spent nearly 20 years drawing maps for various state and local
initiatives, and it is therefore entirely unsurprising that he
exhibited a wealth of knowledge about who lives in which part of
the State. Cf. Miller , 515 U. S., at 916 (state
redistricting officials “will . . . almost always be aware of
racial demographics” during the districting process). The dissent
seeks to undercut Roberts's credibility by labeling him “a veteran
consumer of racial data.” Post , at 18. We think it is unfair
for the dissent to question his credibility simply because he, like
every other expert who has ever worked on a Voting Rights Act case,
has had to “consum[e] . . . racial data” to comply with our
precedents. Finally , the dissent thinks that the
State must have used racial data because that data, in its view, is
more accurate than political data in predicting future votes.
Refusing to use the racial data, according to the dissent, would
have required the “self-restraint of a monk.” Post , at 21.
This jaded view is inconsistent with our case law's longstanding
instruction that the “good faith of [the] state legislature must be
presumed” in redistricting cases. Miller , 515 U. S., at 915.
And in any event, there is little reason to think that it requires
much restraint for a mapmaker with a political aim to use data that
bears directly on what he is trying to achieve, namely, political
data. That is especially so where, as here, the political data,
unlike the racial data that the dissent prefers, took into account
voter turnout. See supra , at 17-19, and n. 7.

															In sum, there is no substance to the dissent's
attacks.

															IV

															The Challengers also raised an independent
vote-dilution claim. The District Court held that this claim was
governed by the “same findings of fact and reasoning” that guided
its racial-gerrymandering analysis, and it thus entered judgment
for the Challengers on that ground as well. 649 F. Supp. 3d, at
198. But in light of our conclusion that those findings were
clearly erroneous, that conclusion cannot stand. Moreover, the
District Court's analysis did not take into account the differences
between vote-dilution and racial-gerrymandering claims.

															A racial-gerrymandering claim asks whether race
predominated in the drawing of a district “regardless of the
motivations” for the use of race. Shaw I , 509 U. S., at 645.
The racial classification itself is the relevant harm in that
context. A vote-dilution claim is “analytically distinct” from a
racial-gerrymandering claim and follows a “different analysis.” Id. , at 650, 652. A plaintiff pressing a vote- dilution
claim cannot prevail simply by showing that race played a
predominant role in the districting process. Rather, such a
plaintiff must show that the State “enacted a particular voting
scheme as a purposeful device to minimize or cancel out the voting
potential of racial or ethnic minorities.” Miller , 515 U.
S., at 911 (internal quotation marks omitted). In other words, the
plaintiff must show that the State's districting plan “has the
purpose and effect” of diluting the minority vote. Shaw
I , 509 U. S., at 649 (emphasis added).

															In light of these two errors in the District
Court's analysis of the Challengers' vote-dilution claim, a remand
is appropriate.

															* * *

															We reverse the judgment of the District Court
in part and remand the case in part for further proceedings
consistent with this opinion.

															It is so ordered. Notes 1 A plaintiff can also establish
racial predominance by showing that the legislature used “race as a
proxy” for “political interest[s].” Miller , 515 U. S., at
914; see also Cooper v. Harris , 581 U.S. 285, 291, n.
1 (2017) (noting that strict scrutiny is warranted when “a
legislature elevated race to the predominant criterion in order to
advance other goals, including political ones”). 2 See, e.g., Pew Research
Center, Behind Biden's 2020 Victory (June 30, 2021),
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/;
NBC News, South Carolina Presidential Election Results 2020 (Nov.
3, 2020),
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-elections/south-carolina-president-results/;
N. Y. Times, South Carolina Exit Polls: How Different Groups Voted
(Nov. 3, 2020),
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-south-carolina.html. 3 N. Y. Times, South Carolina
Election Results: First House Dis-trict (Jan. 28, 2019),
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/south-carolina-house-district-1. 4 N. Y. Times, South Carolina
Election Results: First Congressional District (Nov. 3, 2020),
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-south-carolina-house-district-1.html. 5 During the proceedings, one of
the judges described Roberts as “a very precise guy” and a “good
man.” J. S. A. 74a, 421a. That judge also remarked that he “always
liked asking [Roberts] questions,” that “the legislature's blessed
to have Mr. Roberts,” and that if Roberts says a report is not
accurate, “that's good enough for [him].” Id ., at 74a-75a,
254a, 263a. 6 The dissent is correct to note
that it is not enough for a plaintiff to show that race was a mere
factor in the State's redistricting calculus. Rather, the plaintiff
must show that race played a “ ‘predominant' ” role in shaping a
district's lines. Post, at 17, n. 4 (opinion of Kagan, J.)
(quoting Miller , 515 U. S., at 916). But the dissent then
retreats from this standard because the State denied relying at all
on racial data. Post , at 17, n. 4. That is a puzzling
argument. Parties can stipulate to issues of fact, but they cannot
by stipulation amend the law. See, e.g., United States
Natl. Bank of Ore. v. Independent Ins. Agents of
America , 508 U.S.
439 , 447 (1993). And it would be uniquely perverse to deprive
the State of a more generous constitutional standard simply because
it made the laudable effort to disregard race altogether in the
redistricting process. 7 The dissent argues that racial
data is superior because black Democrats are more loyal to the
party than white Democrats. Post , at 21-22. But whether or
not this is true (and the dissent relies solely on the say-so of
one witness), studies show that non-white voters turn out at a much
lower rate than white voters. See Brennan Center for Justice, K.
Morris & C. Grange, Large Racial Turnout Gap Persisted in 2020
Election (Aug. 6, 2021),
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/large-racial-turnout-gap-persisted-2020-election. 8 The dissent excuses Dr.
Ragusa's failure to control for contiguity on the ground that a
vast majority of the precincts in old District 1 could have been
moved into District 6 without violating contiguity. Post , at
29. However, a quick look at the precincts in the counties that
fall within District 1 shows that this is plainly untrue. (Links to
some of the relevant precinct maps are provided below.) Many
precincts would have had to jump over quite a few others in order
to join District 6. In addition, the dissent ignores the other
objectives that the new map sought to achieve, namely, the
unification of Beaufort and Berkeley Counties and the division of
Charleston between Districts 1 and 6 so that the city would
predictably have one Democratic House Member and one Republican
House Member. For the voting precincts in Beaufort County, see
https://rfa.sc.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/Beaufort%20Precincts%202024.pdf.
For Ber-keley County, see
https://rfa.sc.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/Berkeley%20Precincts.pdf. 9 Two differences in particular
stand out. First, while Dr. Ragusa looked only at Democratic voters
to control for partisanship, Professor Ansolabehere looked at both
Democratic and Republican voters. 1 App. in Cooper v. Harris , O. T. 2016, No. 15-1262, pp. 334-337. Only after
calculating the percentage of black voters moved in each partisan
group did Professor Ansolabehere conclude that “race, and not
party, had a disproportionate effect on the configuration of ” the
congressional districts. Id. , at 337. Second, Professor
Ansolabehere's analysis operated at the voter level. Id. , at
313-314. That enabled him to compare the demographics of the moved
voters to the general population in a way that Dr. Ragusa's
precinct-level analysis cannot. 10 See N. Y.
Times, South Carolina Governor Primary Election Results (Nov. 3,
2020),
https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/south-carolina-governor-primary-election;
N. Y. Times, South Carolina Presidential Election Results (Nov. 3,
2020),
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-south-carolina-president.html;
see also App. 135 (testimony of Baodong Liu) (noting that
Presidential election years “usually ha[ve] a very high level of
voter turnout”). 11 The
dissent, by contrast, would make it virtually impossible to show
clear error in a case like this. The dissent agrees that a
plaintiff raising a racial-gerrymandering claim bears a “demanding
burden.” Post , at 10 (opinion of Kagan, J.). But according
to the dissent's view, clear-error review means that this burden
vanishes on appeal because a plaintiff 's “hardest job should be
done” once it prevails before a three-judge district court. Ibid. That misses the point. In assessing whether a finding
is clearly erroneous, it is important to keep in mind the standard
of proof that the district court was required to apply. It is
hornbook law, after all, that we must ask on appeal whether the
“factfinder in the first instance made a mistake in concluding that
a fact had been proven under the applicable standard of
proof .” Concrete Pipe & Products of Cal., Inc. v. Construction Laborers Pension Trust for Southern Cal. , 508 U.S.
602 , 622-623 (1993) (emphasis added); see also H. Edwards &
L. Elliott, Federal Standards of Review 26 (3d ed. 2018) (“[I]n
applying the clearly erroneous standard, a reviewing court must
take account of the standard of proof informing the trial court's
factual finding”). Once our task is framed properly, we can easily
conclude for the reasons that follow that the District Court
clearly erred when it found that the Challengers carried their
“demanding burden.” SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															No. 22-807

															_________________

															THOMAS C. ALEXANDER, in his official capacity
as PRESIDENT OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA SENATE, et al., APPELLANTS v. THE SOUTH CAROLINA STATE CONFERENCE OF THE NAACP, et
al.

															on appeal from the united states district
court for the district of south carolina

															[May 23, 2024]

															Justice Thomas, concurring in part.

															I join all but Part III-C of the Court's
opinion. The Court correctly concludes that the judgment below must
be reversed under our precedents. Although I find the analysis in
Part III-C persuasive, clear-error review is not an invitation for
the Court to “sift through volumes of facts” and “argue its interpretation of those facts.” Easley v. Cromartie , 532 U.S.
234 , 262 (2001) (Thomas, J., dissenting). The Court's searching
review of the expert reports exceeds the proper scope of
clear-error review. But, that analysis is not necessary to resolve
the case. In Part III-B, the Court explains that the District Court
failed to evaluate evidence reflecting the correlation between race
and politics with the necessary presumption of legislative good
faith. Ante, at 14-18. And, in Part III-D, it explains that
the District Court failed to properly account for the plaintiffs'
failure to produce an alternative map. Ante, at 28-29. Both
of those mistakes are reversible legal errors.

															I write separately to address whether our
voting-rights precedents are faithful to the Constitution. This
case is unique because it presents solely constitutional questions.
The plaintiffs do not rely on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for any
of their claims. Nor do the South Carolina officials invoke the
Voting Rights Act as part of their defense. There can be no more
propitious occasion to consider the constitutional underpinnings of
our voting-rights jurisprudence.

															The plaintiffs press two distinct constitutional
claims. First, they bring a “racial gerrymandering” claim, alleging
that South Carolina drew its new Congressional District 1 to sort
black voters based on their race. To prevail on that claim under
our precedents, the plaintiffs must show that race was the
“predominant factor” in the legislature's approach to drawing the
district. Miller v. Johnson , 515
U.S. 900 , 916 (1995). Second, they bring a “vote dilution”
claim, alleging that South Carolina drew District 1 to
intentionally reduce the voting strength of the district's black
residents. To prevail on that claim under our precedents, the
plaintiffs must show that District 1's design reduces “minority
voters' ability, as a group, 'to elect the candidate of their
choice.' ” Shaw v. Reno , 509
U.S. 630 , 641 (1993) (quoting Allen v. State Bd. of
Elections , 393 U.S.
544 , 569 (1969)).

															In my view, the Court has no power to decide
these types of claims. Drawing political districts is a task for
politicians, not federal judges. There are no judicially manageable
standards for resolving claims about districting, and, regardless,
the Constitution commits those issues exclusively to the political
branches.

															The Court's insistence on adjudicating these
claims has led it to develop doctrines that indulge in race-based
reasoning inimical to the Constitution. As we reiterated last Term,
“ '[o]ur Constitution is color-blind.' ” Students for Fair
Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard
College , 600 U.S. 181, 230 (2023) (quoting Plessy v. Ferguson , 163 U.S.
537 , 559 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting)). A colorblind
Constitution does not require that racial considerations
“predominate” before subjecting them to scrutiny. Nor does it
tolerate groupwide judgments about the preferences and beliefs of
racial minorities. It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts
and leave districting to politicians.

															I

															Determining the proper shape of a district is
a political question not suited to resolution by federal courts.
The questions presented by districting claims are “
'nonjusticiable,' or 'political questions.' ” Vieth v. Jubelirer , 541 U.S.
267 , 277 (2004) (plurality opinion). We have explained that a
question is nonjusticiable when there is “ 'a lack of judicially
discoverable and manageable standards for resolving' ” the issue or
“ 'a textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue
to a coordinate political department.' ” Id ., at 277-278
(quoting Baker v. Carr , 369 U.S.
186 , 217 (1962)).

															In Rucho v. Common Cause , 588 U.S.
684 (2019), we applied those principles to conclude that partisan
gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable. Partisan gerrymandering
claims allege that a political map unduly favors one political
party over another. We explained that partisan gerrymandering
claims therefore present questions about how to “apportion
political power as a matter of fairness,” despite the fact that
“[t]here are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for
making such judgments, let alone limited and precise standards that
are clear, manageable, and politically neutral.” Id ., at
705, 707. We bolstered our conclusion by reference to “the Framers'
decision to entrust districting to political entities” in the
Elections Clause, Art. I, §4, cl. 1. Id ., at 697, 701.
Because courts “have no commission to allocate political power and
influence in the absence of a constitutional directive or legal
standards to guide us in the exercise of such authority,” we held
that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable. Id., at 721.

															The same logic demonstrates that racial
gerrymandering and vote dilution claims are also nonjusticiable. As
with partisan gerrymandering claims, the racial gerrymandering and
vote dilution claims in this case lack “judicially discoverable and
manageable standards” for their resolution. Vieth , 541 U.
S., at 277-278 (internal quotation marks omitted). And, they ask us
to address an issue—congressional districting—that is textually
committed to a coordinate political department, Congress. Id ., at 277. As a result, racial gerrymandering and vote
dilution claims brought under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments are nonjusticiable.

															A

															Racial gerrymandering and vote dilution claims
lack “ 'judicially discoverable and manageable standards' ” for
their resolution. Id. , at 277-278 (quoting Baker , 369
U. S., at 217). Both types of claims turn on questions that cannot
be answered through the kind of reasoning that constitutes an
exercise of the “judicial Power.” Art. III, §1, cl. 1. I address in
turn the reasons why each claim is unmanageable.

															1

															Racial gerrymandering claims ask courts to
reverse- engineer the purposes behind a complex and often arbitrary
legislative process. The standard developed under our precedents
“require[s] the plaintiff to show that race was the 'predominant
factor motivating the legislature's decision to place a significant
number of voters within or without a particular district.' ” Ante, at 2 (quoting Miller , 515 U. S., at 916). In
other words, “a plaintiff must prove that the legislature
subordinated traditional race-neutral districting principles . . .
to racial considerations.” Id ., at 916. The Court's focus on
legislative purpose is unavoidable because “the constitutional
violation in racial gerrymandering cases stems from the racial
purpose of state action,” not the resulting map. Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections , 580
U.S. 178, 189 (2017) (internal quotation marks omitted).

															Divining legislative purpose is a dubious
undertaking in the best of circumstances, but the task is all but
impossible in gerrymandering cases. “Electoral districting is a
most difficult subject for legislatures,” a pure “exercise [of] the
political judgment necessary to balance competing interests.” Miller , 515 U. S., at 915. We have therefore cautioned
courts to “be sensitive to the complex interplay of forces that
enter a legislature's redistricting calculus.” Id. , at
915-916.

															In cases without smoking-gun evidence, the only
practical way to prove that a State considered race when drawing
districts is to “show that the State's chosen map conflicts with
traditional redistricting criteria.”[ 1 ] Ante, at 3. The Court's racial gerrymandering
precedents use the term “ 'traditional districting principles' ” to
refer to the “competing interests” and “complex . . . forces”
involved in drawing districts. Miller , 515 U. S., at
915-916, 919 (quoting Shaw , 509 U. S., at 647). Judging a
map's consistency or conflict with traditional districting
principles requires a court to ascertain what kinds of maps should
result from the application of those principles.

															Determining how a legislature would have drawn
district lines in a vacuum is a fool's errand. Indeed, as we have
defined them, “traditional districting principles” are simply
anything relevant to drawing districts other than race. They
include “principles such as compactness, contiguity, and respect
for political subdivisions.” Id. , at 647. They also include
“keeping communities of interest together, and protecting
incumbents,” Rucho , 588 U. S., at 706-707, as well as
“minimizing change,” Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama , 575 U.S. 254, 259 (2015). Today, the Court
identifies “the legislature's partisan interests” as a traditional
criterion. Ante, at 19. Even considerations such as a
district's “consistently urban character,” “common media sources,”
and inclusion of “major transportation lines . . . implicate
traditional districting principles.” Bush v. Vera , 517 U.S.
952 , 966 (1996) (plurality opinion). We have readily
acknowledged that “[t]raditional redistricting principles . . . are
numerous and malleable,” and that “some . . . are surprisingly
ethereal and admit of degrees.” Bethune-Hill , 580 U. S., at
190 (alteration and internal quotation marks omitted).

															To evaluate whether a map aligns with
traditional districting principles, a court must “rank the relative
importance of those . . . criteria.” Rucho , 588 U. S., at
708. Without such a ranking, it is impossible to say what kinds of
maps the principles should yield. But, that analysis ensnarls
courts in a political thicket. Traditional districting principles
often conflict with one another, and there is no principled way for
judges to resolve those conflicts. Consider the question whether
the principles of contiguity and compactness can justify a map that
retains a relatively small part of the old district's core. See ante, at 19, 21. Or, consider whether the principle of
keeping communities of interest together can justify uniting one
community at the cost of splitting another between several
districts, or healing partially an existing split at the cost of
introducing a new one. See Allen v. Milligan , 599
U.S. 1, 57, 61 (2023) (Thomas, J., dissenting). These questions do
not ask for legal answers, only political compromises. Judicial
resolution of racial gerrymandering claims thus requires precisely
the kind of “inconsistent, illogical, and ad hoc” decisionmaking
that we have said is beyond the judicial power. Vieth , 541
U. S., at 278.

															Evaluating compliance with traditional
districting principles is further complicated by the fact that many
decisions are equally consistent with both a good-faith application
of those principles and with common gerrymandering techniques. A
legislature seeking to gerrymander a district will often proceed by
“packing” or “cracking” groups of minority voters. “Packing” means
concentrating minority voters in a single district to reduce their
influence in surrounding districts. “Cracking” means splitting a
group of minority voters between multiple districts to avoid strong
minority influence in any one district. But, in areas where
“political groups . . . tend to cluster (as is the case with
Democratic voters in cities),” apparent packing or cracking can
simply reflect “adherence to compactness and respect for political
subdivision lines” or “the traditional criterion of incumbency
protection.” Id ., at 290, 298. This case exemplifies the
problem—the majority observes that Dr. Moon Duchin's report failed
to “account for” the traditional districting principles of
“partisanship or core retention” in “assessing whether the Enacted
Plan 'cracks' black voters among multiple districts.” Ante, at 28-29. The difference between illegitimate packing and the
legitimate pursuit of compactness is too often in the eye of the
beholder.

															Perhaps the most serious obstacle to evaluating
whether a map is consistent with traditional districting principles
is the fact that race and politics are, at present, highly
correlated in American society. Racial gerrymandering is
constitutionally suspect, but “a jurisdiction may engage in
constitutional political gerrymandering.” Rucho , 588 U. S.,
at 701 (internal quotation marks omitted). So, even if a court is
able to navigate all the complications I have identified so far, it
must still contend with the reality that “political and racial
reasons are capable of yielding similar oddities in a district's
boundaries.” Cooper v. Harris , 581 U.S. 285, 308
(2017). To that end, “when the State asserts partisanship as a
defense,” plaintiffs must meet the “formidable task” of
“disentangl[ing] race from politics and prov[ing] that the former
drove a district's lines.” Ibid . Courts are not well
equipped to evaluate whether plaintiffs succeed in disentangling
race and politics.

															As the Court observes, roughly 90% of black
voters in South Carolina supported the Democratic candidate in the
last Presidential election. Ante, at 4, and n. 2. When
nearly all black voters support Democrats, an effort to
strategically sort Democratic voters can be indistinguishable from
an effort to strategically sort black voters. In this case, all
Democratic-leaning maps presented during the districting process
featured a black share of the voting-age population of 21% or
higher, and all Republican-leaning maps featured a black voter
share of 17% or lower. Ante, at 15. The dispute in this case
therefore focuses on whether that correlation reflected a racial
purpose, or merely reflected the result of a political purpose.

															The majority's reasoning highlights the
difficulties inherent in disentangling race and politics. Its
explanation of why the expert evidence was insufficient does not
rest on the application of legal principles, but on the likely
errors it finds in the experts' statistical models after a “foray
into the minutiae of the record.” Cromartie , 532 U. S., at
262 (opinion of Thomas, J.). The majority discounts four separate
expert reports based on methodological concerns. One report is
insufficient because it fails to model partisanship. Ante, at 19-21. Another “carries less weight” because it measures
partisanship through the wrong statistical method. Ante , at
25. And, another cannot be relied upon because it measures
partisanship with the wrong election data. Ante , at 26-27.
The dissent accuses the Court of “play[ing] armchair statistician.” Post , at 31 (opinion of Kagan, J.). But, the dissent's
defense of the expert reports includes an exercise in armchair
cartography. The dissent justifies the experts' assumption that the
legislature could move any precinct in District 1 to District 6 by
explaining that District 1 is thin, coastal, and shares a long
border with District 6. Post , at 28-30. It supports its
hunch with two zoomed-out maps that include no information about
precinct size or location. Post, at 35, Appendix. This type
of back-and-forth is the inevitable result of our voting-rights
doctrine. One worries that the Court will soon begin drawing its
own sample maps and performing in-house regression analyses.

															A system in which only specialized experts can
discern the existence of a constitutional injury is intolerable,
and strongly suggests that the racial gerrymandering injury is not
amenable to judicial resolution. We should resist the temptation to
reduce the Fourteenth Amendment to a battle of expert witnesses.
Our gerrymandering misadventures demonstrate that these claims lack
judicially manageable standards.

															2

															As I have long maintained, vote dilution
claims are also “not readily subjected to any judicially manageable
standards.” Holder v. Hall , 512
U.S. 874 , 901-902 (1994) (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment).
To prove vote dilution as a constitutional claim, our precedents
require plaintiffs to show that the design of a district reduces
“minority voters' ability, as a group, to elect the candidate of
their choice.” Shaw , 509 U. S., at 641 (internal quotation
marks omitted). The same consideration is used for vote dilution
claims brought under §2 of the Voting Rights Act. See Allen ,
599 U. S., at 13 (explaining that §2 “borrow[s] language from a
Fourteenth Amendment [vote dilution] case”).

															To assess whether a legislature has diluted a
minority's vote, “the critical question . . . is: 'Diluted relative
to what benchmark?' ” Id. , at 50 (opinion of Thomas, J.)
(quoting Gonzalez v. Aurora , 535 F.3d 594, 598 (CA7
2008) (Easterbrook, C. J.)). Despite repeated efforts in our Voting
Rights Act cases, the Court has “never succeeded” in formulating
“an objective and workable method of identifying the undiluted
benchmark.” 599 U. S., at 69 (opinion of Thomas, J.). The Court's
failure is not surprising because the task is futile. The
Constitution does not offer “a theory for defining effective
participation in representative government.” Holder , 512 U.
S., at 897 (opinion of Thomas, J.).

															Choosing among theories of effective
representation depends on particular voters' objectives and
preferred political strategies, not principles of constitutional
law. Are a minority's votes “more 'effective' when they provide influence over a greater number of seats, or control over a lesser number of seats”? Id ., at 899. Are minority
voters “ 'represented' only when they choose a delegate who will
mirror their views in the legislative halls,” or does the
“practical influence” of a small group of potential swing voters
also amount to effective representation? Id ., at 900. Only
minority voters themselves can answer these questions. No “theory
of the 'effective' vote” is “inherent in the concept of
representative democracy itself.” Id ., at 899. So, when our
precedents ask a court to determine if a minority's vote is
diluted, they are “actually ask[ing]” the court “ 'to choose among
competing bases of representation—ultimately, really, among
competing theories of political philosophy.' ” Id. , at 897
(quoting Baker , 369 U. S., at 300 (Frankfurter, J.,
dissenting)). The Constitution expresses no view on such issues,
and they are not amenable to judicial resolution.

															In practice, this Court has endorsed a theory of
representation that distributes legislative seats in direct
proportion to racial demographics. “[T]he 'lack of any better
alternative' identified in our case law” and the “intuitive appeal”
of “direct proportionality” make a racial proportionality standard
irresistible. Allen , 599 U. S., at 72 (opinion of Thomas,
J.) (quoting Holder , 512 U. S., at 937 (opinion of Thomas,
J.)). As a result, there is a “near-perfect correlation between
[courts'] proportionality findings and [vote dilution] liability
results.” 599 U. S., at 72 (citing E. Katz, M. Aisenbrey, A.
Baldwin, E. Cheuse, & A. Weisbrodt, Documenting Discrimination
in Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights
Act Since 1982, 39 U. Mich. J. L. Reform 643, 730-732 (2006)). A
proportionality approach is easy to apply, but it is “ radically
inconsistent with the [Reconstruction] Amendments' command that
government treat citizens as individuals and their 'goal of a
political system in which race no longer matters.' ” 599 U. S., at
82 (quoting Shaw , 509 U. S., at 657).

															I continue to believe that “[t]he matters the
Court has set out to resolve in vote dilution cases are . . . not
questions of law,” and that “they are not readily subjected to any
judicially manageable standards.” Holder , 512 U. S., at
901-902 (opinion of Thomas, J.). The Court's determination to
nonetheless adjudicate these cases has yielded an unconstitutional
practice of distributing of political power based on race.

															B

															Racial gerrymandering and vote dilution
claims—at a minimum, those challenging congressional districts—are
nonjusticiable for an additional reason: The Elections Clause makes
a “textually demonstrable constitutional commitment” of the power
to oversee congressional districting to “a coordinate political
department,” Congress. Vieth , 541 U. S., at 277 (internal
quotation marks omitted). And, no other constitutional provision
overcomes that commitment to Congress. The Constitution
contemplates no role for the federal courts in the districting
process.

															1

															Although States have the initial duty to draw
district lines, the Elections Clause commits exclusive supervisory
authority over the States' drawing of congressional districts to
Congress—not federal courts. It provides: “The Times, Places and
Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall
be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the
Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations,
except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” Art. I, §4, cl. 1.
The first part of the Clause “imposes a duty upon” state
legislatures to “prescribe the details necessary to hold
congressional elections.” U. S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton , 514 U.S.
779 , 862 (1995) (Thomas, J., dissenting). The second part
“grants power exclusively to Congress” to police the state
legislatures' performance of their duty. Id ., at 864.
Critically, the Clause leaves the Judiciary out of the districting
process entirely.

															The Clause's assignment of roles is
comprehensive. For example, a state legislature's responsibility
over congressional elections “ 'transcends any limitations sought
to be imposed by the people of a State' ” through other state
actors; the state legislature is the exclusive state
authority. Moore v. Harper , 600 U.S. 1, 58 (2023)
(Thomas, J., dissenting) (quoting Leser v. Garnett , 258 U.S.
130 , 137 (1922)). In a similar vein, the Clause makes Congress
the exclusive federal authority over States' efforts to draw
congressional districts, to the exclusion of courts.

															The historical record compels this
interpretation of the Elections Clause's text. Gerrymandering and
vote dilution are not new phenomena. The founding generation was
familiar with political districting problems from the American
colonial experience. See Vieth , 541 U. S., at 274
(collecting examples). But, the Framers nowhere suggested the
federal courts as a potential solution to those problems. Instead,
they relied on congressional oversight. The Framers' considered
choice of a nonjudicial remedy is highly relevant context to the
interpretation of the Elections Clause. See New York State Rifle
& Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen , 597 U.S. 1, 26-27
(2022).

															Because the Elections Clause attracted
considerable criticism during the ratification debates, ample
contemporaneous discussion sheds light on the original
understanding of the Clause. As a delegate to the Virginia
ratifying convention observed, Congress's power to regulate the
time, place, and manner of elections drew objections that “echoed
from one end of the continent to the other.” 3 Debates on the
Constitution 9 (J. Elliot ed. 1836) (Elliot's Debates). Opponents
of ratification attacked the Clause as a radical expansion of
national power and a grave danger to liberty. Patrick Henry argued:
“What can be more defective than the clause concerning the
elections? The control given to Congress over the time, place, and
manner of holding elections, will totally destroy the end of
suffrage.” Id ., at 60.

															Defenses of the Elections Clause demonstrate
that it was designed at least in part as a way to address abusive
districting. To be sure, proponents of ratification primarily
justified the Clause as a “constitutional remedy for th[e] evil”
presented by the possibility that “the states [might] neglect to
appoint representatives ” to the new Federal Government. 2 id., at 326 (statement of John Jay). But, other defenses of
the Elections Clause resonate with modern concerns about
gerrymandering and vote dilution.

															Some proponents of ratification championed the
Clause as necessary “for securing to the people their equal rights
of election.” Id. , at 26. A delegate to the Massachusetts
ratifying convention cautioned that “a state legislature . . . in
times of popular commotion, and when faction and party spirit run
high, . . . might make an unequal and partial division of the
states into districts for the election of representatives.” Id ., at 27. In such a situation, he explained, “the people
can have no remedy” except for that created by the Elections
Clause: the “controlling power” by which Congress may “preserve and
restore to the people their equal and sacred rights of election.” Ibid . And, James Madison raised similar arguments at the
Constitutional Convention. See 2 Records of the Federal Convention
of 1787, pp. 240-241 (M. Farrand ed. 1911).

															It was Congress, not the courts, that the
Founders contemplated would provide recourse against state
intrusions on voting rights through the districting process. Even
when listing all entities that could possibly regulate congressional elections, the founding generation did not
consider the federal courts. To support his assertion that “the
discretionary power over elections ought to exist somewhere,”
Alexander Hamilton posited that “there were only three ways
in which this power could have been reasonably organized; that it
must either have been lodged wholly in the National Legislature, or
wholly in the State Legislatures, or primarily in the latter, and
ultimately in the former.” The Federalist No. 59, p. 326 (E. Scott
ed. 1898) (emphasis added). A delegate made the same observation at
the Massachusetts ratifying convention: “The power . . . to
regulate the elections of our federal representatives must be
lodged somewhere. I know of but two bodies wherein it can be
lodged— the legislatures of the several states, and the general
Congress .” 2 Elliot's Debates 24.

															The Elections Clause's text and history
therefore point to the same conclusion: The Clause commits
supervisory authority over congressional districting to Congress
alone. “At no point” during the drafting or ratification of the
Constitution “was there a suggestion that the federal courts had a
role to play” in resolving “electoral districting problems.” Rucho , 588 U. S., at 699. Even when the debate touched on
how political districting could affect the voting rights of
individuals, it was understood that any remedy related to
districting would come from Congress, not federal courts.[ 2 ]

															2

															None of the Constitution's other provisions
undercuts or countermands the Elections Clause's clear mandate for
Congress to supervise the States' districting efforts. The Court
has viewed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as the source of
its authority to entertain challenges to districts. But, the
Reconstruction Amendments are perfectly consistent with Congress's
exclusive authority to oversee congressional districting.

															Our decisions primarily identify the Equal
Protection Clause as the textual basis for judicial resolution of
districting claims. See Shaw , 509 U. S., at 642; Davis v. Bandemer , 478 U.S.
109 , 151 (1986) (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment)
(asserting that, in contrast to political gerrymandering, “the
greater warrant the Equal Protection Clause gives the federal
courts to intervene for protection against racial discrimination .
. . render[s] racial gerrymandering claims justiciable”). That
conclusion does not comport with the text of the Equal Protection
Clause or the structure of the Reconstruction Amendments.

															The text of the Equal Protection Clause makes it
an unlikely source for claims about political districting. The
Equal Protection Clause provides that “[n]o State shall . . . deny
to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.” Amdt. 14, §1. The Clause's “focus on 'protection' ” suggests
that it imposes only “ 'a duty on each state to protect all persons
and property within its jurisdiction from violence and to enforce
their rights through the court system,' ” not a “prohibit[ion on]
discriminatory legislative classifications.” United States v. Vaello Madero , 596 U.S. 159, 178-179, n. 4 (2022)
(Thomas, J., concurring) (quoting C. Green, The Original Sense of
the (Equal) Protection Clause: Pre-Enactment History, 19 Geo. Mason
U. Civ. Rights L. J. 1, 3 (2008)). So understood, the Equal
Protection Clause has no obvious bearing on districting.[ 3 ]

															Reading the Equal Protection Clause—or anything
else in §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment—to invite judicial
involvement in disputes over voting rights also ignores the fact
that another part of the Fourteenth Amendment deals directly with
those rights. Section 2 provides that “when the right to vote . . .
is denied” to a State's voting-age male citizens “or in any way
abridged,” the State's apportionment of congressional
representatives “shall be reduced in the proportion” of the denial
of the franchise. Congress alone can provide that remedy through
its power to apportion representatives among the States. See Art.
I, §2, cl. 3. Federal courts are therefore unable to enforce §2.
See Saunders v. Wilkins , 152 F.2d 235 (CA4), cert.
denied, 328 U.S. 870 (1945). The express provision of a nonjudicial
remedy for voting-rights violations in §2 counsels against reading
§1 to allow judicial remedies implicitly in those same
voting-rights disputes. Cf. Reynolds v. Sims , 377
U.S. 533 , 594 (1964) (Harlan, J., dissenting).

															Reading the Equal Protection Clause to support
claims for racial gerrymandering or vote dilution also makes the
existence of the Fifteenth Amendment unexplainable. If §1 of the
Fourteenth Amendment allows for such fulsome protection of the
franchise by federal courts, it is hard to see why “Congress and
the States still found it necessary to adopt the Fifteenth
Amendment—which protects '[t]he right of citizens of the United
States to vote'—two years after the Fourteenth Amendment's
passage.” McDonald , 561 U. S., at 852 (opinion of Thomas,
J.).

															Nor can the Fifteenth Amendment justify racial
gerrymandering or vote dilution claims in its own right. The
Fifteenth Amendment is the primary constitutional protection for
the voting rights of racial minorities. But, the Fifteenth
Amendment “address[es] only matters relating to access to the
ballot.” Holder , 512 U. S., at 930 (opinion of Thomas, J.).
“[I]ts protections [are] satisfied as long as members of racial
minorities [can] ' “register and vote without hindrance.” ' ” Id ., at 921 (quoting Mobile v. Bolden , 446 U.S.
55 , 65 (1980) (plurality opinion)). The Court's decision in Gomillion v. Lightfoot , 364 U.S.
339 (1960)—a Fifteenth Amendment case often cited as a
touchstone of our racial gerrymandering jurisprudence—is consistent
with this understanding. Gomillion involved only a claim
“that the boundaries of a city had been drawn to prevent blacks
from voting in municipal elections altogether,” not a claim about
the way minority voters were distributed between two districts. Holder , 512 U. S., at 920, n. 20 (opinion of Thomas,
J.).

															At this juncture, I see no directive in the
Reconstruction Amendments for courts to police the lines between
political districts. Instead, the Elections Clause assigns the
responsibility for supervising the States' drawing of congressional
districts solely to Congress.

															* * *

															Racial gerrymandering and vote dilution claims
lack judicially manageable standards for their resolution. And,
they conflict with the Constitution's textual commitment of
congressional districting issues to the state legislatures and
Congress. They therefore present nonjusticiable political
questions. The Court should extricate itself from this business and
return political districting to the political branches, where it
belongs.

															II

															When an institution strays from its
competencies, one does not expect good results. This Court's
efforts in the districting field are no exception. The underlying
nonjusticiability of racial gerrymandering and vote dilution claims
leads us to distort our doctrines in numerous ways. The standard
that the Court uses to resolve racial gerrymandering claims betrays
the colorblind promise of the Fourteenth Amendment by endorsing the
notion that some racial classifications are benign. The standard
that the Court uses to resolve vote dilution claims invariably
falls back on racial stereotypes. And, the remedy commonly ordered
in redistricting cases—a judicially imposed map—ignores the normal
limits on federal equity power. Taken together, the Court's
misconceived doctrines leave the States in an unenviable
position.

															A

															The racial predominance standard for racial
gerrymandering claims is plainly inconsistent with the fact that “
'[o]ur Constitution is color-blind.' ” Harvard College , 600
U. S., at 230 (quoting Plessy , 163 U. S., at 559 (opinion of
Harlan, J.)). Ordinarily, any governmental consideration of
race—even as a second-order consideration—triggers strict scrutiny.
For example, using race merely as a “tip” or a “plus” factor in
college admissions does not excuse a university from satisfying
strict scrutiny. 600 U. S., at 195-196, 213 (internal quotation
marks omitted).

															Our voting-rights precedents diverge from this
rule by subjecting an alleged racial gerrymander to strict scrutiny
only if “race was the ' predominant factor motivating the
legislature's decision to place a significant number of voters
within or without a particular district.' ” Ante, at 2
(quoting Miller , 515 U. S., at 916) (emphasis added). A
“predominance” requirement conflicts with the classification-based
harm that racial gerrymandering claims purport to address. The
constitutional injury underlying a racial gerrymandering claim is
the legislature's mere use of a racial classification in drawing
its map. See Bethune-Hill , 580 U. S., at 189. That injury
exists whether race is a legislature's first or last consideration
in drawing districts. “Racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society.” Shaw , 509 U.
S., at 657 (emphasis added). “They reinforce the belief . . . that
individuals should be judged by the color of their skin” and
“balkanize us into competing racial factions.” Ibid . All
racial classifications are inherently suspect, whether predominant
or not.

															The Court developed the racial predominance
standard with concerns about the justiciability of gerrymandering
claims in mind. The Court initially formulated the predominance
standard while observing that “[f]ederal-court review of
districting legislation represents a serious intrusion on the most
vital of local functions,” and stressing the need to allow States
“discretion to exercise the political judgment necessary to balance
competing interests.” Miller , 515 U. S., at 915. And, after
describing the predominance standard, the Court cautioned that
federal courts must consider the problem of racial gerrymandering
in light of “the intrusive potential of judicial intervention into
the legislative realm.” Id. , at 916. These concerns about
intruding on the political process should have been a clear sign to
retreat. Instead, the Court forged ahead to adopt a
constitutionally suspect compromise.

															The racial predominance standard does not even
purport to be consistent with the colorblind Constitution. The Miller Court simply borrowed that standard from the District
Court's flawed opinion below. The Court endorsed the District
Court's decision “to require strict scrutiny whenever race is the
'overriding, predominant force' in the redistricting process.” Id. , at 909, 917 (quoting Johnson v. Miller ,
864 F. Supp. 1354, 1372 (SD Ga. 1994)). But, the District Court's
opinion could not have been a stronger rejection of our colorblind
Constitution. It acknowledged that the racial predominance standard
allowed legislatures to “intentionally consider race in
redistricting—and even alter the occasional line in keeping with
that consideration—without incurring constitutional review.” Id. , at 1373. But, the District Court reasoned, “[b]oth the
Supreme Court and Congress have already admitted that the
Constitution is not genuinely 'color-blind.' ” Id ., at 1374.
This provenance underscores the inconsistency of the racial
predominance standard with our colorblind Constitution.

															Any use of race in drawing political
districts—no matter how minor—must be justified by a compelling
interest. The Court's insistence on hearing nonjusticiable
districting claims leads it to disregard that principle in favor of
a distorted standard that legitimizes racial classifications. If
the Court is truly concerned about intruding on the political
process, it should acknowledge that districting is a political
question and vacate the field.

															B

															The Court's standard for vote dilution claims
is similarly flawed, because it requires judges to engage in racial
stereotyping. As I have explained, the Constitution does not define
a baseline of effective representation by which to evaluate the
dilution of a vote. Supra , at 9-11. The Court has purported
to fill that gap by looking to “minority voters' ability, as a
group, 'to elect the candidate of their choice.' ” Shaw , 509
U. S., at 641 (quoting Allen , 393 U. S., at 569). Simply
put, the lack of a manageable vote dilution standard has led the
Court to fall back on generalized expectations about members of
minority groups.

															“Our constitutional history does not tolerate
[the] choice” to treat as “the touchstone of an individual's
identity . . . the color of their skin.” Harvard College ,
600 U. S., at 231. It therefore does not permit courts to make
judgments about what candidate “minority voters as a group” would
choose. That assessment requires a court to assume that “members of
racial and ethnic groups must all think alike on important matters
of public policy.” Holder , 512 U. S., at 903 (opinion of
Thomas, J.). And, it requires a court to construct a caricature of
the racial group to determine—in the abstract—the attributes that
define “the candidate of its choice.” The Constitution does not
indulge the belief that members of racial minorities “always (or
even consistently) express some characteristic minority viewpoint
on any issue.” Harvard College , 600 U. S., at 219 (internal
quotation marks omitted).

															The racial stereotyping encouraged by our vote
dilution precedents is pronounced here. To establish vote dilution,
the plaintiffs point to the District Court's observation that
recent elections in the district “ 'were close, with less than one
percent separating the candidates,' so increasing the district's
Black population to 20% 'would produce a “toss up” district' ”
instead of a Republican one. Brief for Appellees 64. But, that
reasoning simply equates the ability of black South Carolinians to
elect the candidate of their choice with their ability to elect a
Democrat—an exercise in racial stereotyping. The mere fact that
“members of a racial group tend to prefer the same candidates” is
not license to treat that correlation as an absolute truth. Holder , 512 U. S., at 904 (opinion of Thomas, J.).
Plaintiffs make no effort to explore whether the affinity of the
district's black population toward the Democratic Party “might be
the product of similar socioeconomic interests rather than some
other factor related to race.” Ibid . They instead proceed on
the “working assumption that racial groups can be conceived of
largely as political interest groups.” Id ., at 905. The
Constitution forbids such an assumption.

															The plaintiffs' stereotyping does not stop
there. They contend that their vote dilution claim also finds
support in an expert report evaluating the ability of black South
Carolinians to elect the candidate of their choice. That expert
based her conclusion on the results of “elections with Black
candidates on the ballot.” Brief for Appellees 64. The plaintiffs'
argument therefore assumes that the “candidate of choice” for black
voters is simply a black candidate. But, the stereotyping is worse
than that. In 2016, South Carolina reelected Republican Tim Scott
to the United States Senate; Scott is the first black senator from
the South since Reconstruction. The plaintiffs and their expert
nonetheless decided that this race was not “considered
probative for Black electoral opportunity.” Supp. App. to Juris.
Statement 174a. Plaintiffs' argument therefore combines two
stereotypes by assuming that black South Carolinians can be
properly represented only by a black Democrat .

															Such stereotyping is, of course, not limited to
this case or black voters. For example, a District Court recently
concluded that Hispanic voters in a majority-Hispanic district
lacked an opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice, even
though the district elected a Hispanic Republican. Soto
Palmer v. Hobbs , ___ F. Supp. 3d ___, 2023 WL 5125390,
*5, *9, *12 (WD Wash., Aug. 10, 2023). The court later purported to
correct the lack of Hispanic opportunity by imposing a remedial map
that made the district “substantially more Democratic,” but
slightly less Hispanic. Soto Palmer , 2024 WL 1138939, *2, *5
(Mar. 15, 2024). In short, the court concluded that securing the
rights of Hispanic voters required replacing some of those voters
with non-Hispanic Democrats. That dismissive attitude toward
non-Democratic members of minority groups exemplifies the tendency
of the Court's race-obsessed jurisprudence to “balkanize us into
competing racial factions.” Shaw , 509 U. S., at 657. The
Court should correct course now before it inflicts further
damage.

															The vote dilution analysis in this case
inevitably reduces black Charlestonians to partisan pawns and
racial tokens. The analysis is demeaning to the courts asked to
perform it, to say nothing of the black voters that it stereotypes.
“The assumptions upon which our vote dilution decisions have been
based should be repugnant to any nation that strives for the ideal
of a color-blind Constitution.” Holder , 512 U. S., at
905-906 (opinion of Thomas, J.).

															C

															The Court's insistence on adjudicating racial
gerrymandering and vote dilution claims has also tempted it to
ignore constitutional limits on its remedial powers. Ultimately,
the only remedy for the constitutional injuries caused by an
illegally drawn map is a new map. But, federal courts lack “the
power to create remedies previously unknown to equity
jurisprudence.” Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S. A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc. , 527 U.S.
308 , 332 (1999). And, there is no “indication that the Framers
had ever heard of courts” playing any role in resolving electoral
districting problems. Rucho , 588 U. S., at 699. The power to
redraw a States' electoral districts therefore exceeds “the
jurisdiction in equity exercised by the High Court of Chancery in
England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the
enactment of the original Judiciary Act.” Grupo Mexicano ,
527 U. S., at 318 (internal quotation marks omitted).

															The Court once recognized its limited equitable
powers in this area. We previously acknowledged that “[o]f course
no court can affirmatively re-map [a State's] districts so as to
bring them more in conformity with the standards of fairness for a
representative system. At best we could only declare the existing
electoral system invalid.” Colegrove v. Green , 328 U.S.
549 , 553 (1946) (opinion of Frankfurter, J.); see also Baker , 369 U. S., at 328 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
(“Surely a Federal District Court could not itself remap the
State”).

															The view of equity required to justify a
judicial map-drawing power emerged only in the 1950s. The Court's
“impatience with the pace of desegregation” caused by resistance to Brown v. Board of Education , 347
U.S. 483 (1954), “led us to approve . . . extraordinary
remedial measures,” Missouri v. Jenkins , 515 U.S.
70 , 125 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring). In the follow-on case
to Brown , the Court considered “the manner in which relief
[was] to be accorded” for vindication of “the fundamental principle
that racial discrimination in public education is
unconstitutional.” Brown v. Board of Education , 349 U.S.
294 , 298 (1955) ( Brown II ). In doing so, the Court took
a boundless view of equitable remedies, describing equity as being
“characterized by a practical flexibility in shaping its remedies
and by a facility for adjusting and reconciling public and private
needs.” Id ., at 300 (footnote omitted). That understanding
may have justified temporary measures to “overcome the widespread
resistance to the dictates of the Constitution” prevalent at that
time, but, as a general matter, “[s]uch extravagant uses of
judicial power are at odds with the history and tradition of the
equity power and the Framers' design.” Jenkins , 515 U. S.,
at 125-126 (opinion of Thomas, J.). Federal courts have the power
to grant only the equitable relief “traditionally accorded by
courts of eq-uity,” not the flexible power to invent whatever new
remedies may seem useful at the time. Grupo Mexicano , 527 U.
S., at 319.

															Redistricting remedies rest on the same
questionable understanding of equitable power. No court has
explained where the power to draw a replacement map comes from, but
all now assume it may be exercised as a matter of course. The most
consideration this Court has given to the question, if it can be
called consideration, was in Reynolds v. Sims , 377 U.S.
533 . In that case, the Court foreswore any attempt to “consider
. . . the difficult question of the proper remedial devices which
federal courts should utilize in state legislative reapportionment
cases,” but nonetheless upheld, as an act of “proper judicial
restraint,” the District Court “ordering its own temporary
reapportionment plan.” Id. , at 585-586. The Court's only
support for that conclusion was the naked statement in Justice
Douglas's Baker concurrence that “ 'any relief accorded can
be fashioned in the light of well-known principles of equity.' ” Reynolds , 377 U. S., at 585 (quoting 369 U. S., at 250).
Douglas's statement is an obvious fallback to the “practical
flexibility” extolled as a “traditional attribut[e] of equity
power” in Brown II . 349 U. S., at 300. The explanation is
wholly inadequate; the Court has never attempted to ground the
map-drawing power in “the jurisdiction in equity exercised by the
High Court of Chancery in England” in 1789. Grupo Mexicano ,
527 U. S., at 318 (internal quotation marks omitted).

															The lack of a historically grounded map-drawing
remedy is an enormous problem for districting claims, because no
historically supportable remedy can correct an improperly drawn
district. The most promising option is “[t]he negative injunction
remedy against state officials countenanced in Ex parte
Young ,” a “standard tool of equity that federal courts have
authority to entertain under their traditional equitable
jurisdiction.” Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson , 595
U.S. 30, 53 (2021) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting
in part) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see also Ex Parte Young , 209 U.S.
123 (1908). The Court has “long held that federal courts may in
some circumstances grant injunctive relief against state officers
who are violating, or planning to violate, federal law.” Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center, Inc. , 575 U.S.
320 , 326 (2015).

															But, a negative-injunction remedy does not
actually redress racial gerrymandering or vote dilution, for two
reasons. First, it is not apparent that an Ex parte Young injunction can prevent a state election official from conducting an
election under an unconstitutional map, or force him to draw a new
map. Such an injunction “permits a party to assert in equity a
defense that would otherwise have been available in the State's
enforcement proceedings at law,” and it “extends no further than
permitting private parties in some circumstances to prevent state
officials from bringing an action to enforce a state law that is
contrary to federal law.” Whole Woman's Health , 595 U. S.,
at 53 (opinion of Thomas, J.) (alteration and internal quotation
marks omitted). It is thus not clear that such an injunction could
stop an election. Second, even if it is possible to enjoin state
officials from conducting an election, it is questionable whether
that remedy is ever “equitable.” Our system of government depends
on regular elections; putting elections indefinitely on hold may do
more harm than good. Cf. Baker , 369 U. S., at 327 (opinion
of Frankfurter, J.) (“An injunction restraining a general election
unless the legislature reapportions would paralyze the critical
centers of a State's political system and threaten political
dislocation whose consequences are not foreseeable”). Ultimately,
to remedy racial gerrymandering or vote dilution, someone must draw
a new map. I can find no explanation why that “someone” can be a
federal court.

															D

															The Court's attempts to adjudicate the
impossible have put the States in an untenable position. We have
hesitated to subject States to the “ ' “competing hazards of
liability” ' ” that arise from the fact that the Constitution
“restricts consideration of race and the [Voting Rights Act]
demands consideration of race.” Abbott v. Perez , 585
U.S. 579, 587 (2018) (quoting Vera , 517 U. S., at 977
(plurality opinion)). But, the lack of manageable standards for
districting claims and the unfortunate trajectory of the Court's
Voting Rights Act precedents combine to make it impossible for
States to navigate these hazards.

															Last Term, the Court held that the Voting Rights
Act required Alabama to draw a map that would give black Alabamians
a majority in two of the State's seven congressional districts.
Because black Alabamians make up less than two-sevenths of the
State's population, such a map could result only from an obsessive
focus on race in the map-drawing process. See Allen , 599 U.
S., at 56 (opinion of Thomas, J.). For example, one of the
plaintiffs' experts used a race-neutral algorithm to generate 2
million random maps; not a single map yielded two majority-black
districts. Id. , at 58-59. In this case, however, South
Carolina faced a real risk of constitutional liability based on
allegations that it considered race too heavily in drawing a
district that was 17% black instead of 20%.

															In fact, the Court recently granted emergency
relief after a State failed to thread the impossible needle created
by our voting-rights precedents. Voters in Louisiana challenged the
State's 2022 congressional map, arguing that “Louisiana was
required under the Voting Rights Act to create a second
black-majority district.” Robinson v. Ardoin , 86 F.
4th 574, 585 (CA5 2023). The Fifth Circuit concluded that the
plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their Voting Rights Act claim.
Louisiana argued that, under the Voting Rights Act, “the
possibility of drawing a majority-minority district does not
require the drawing of the district,” but the court pointed to our
decision in Allen to reject that contention. 86 F. 4th, at
599. Louisiana then held a special legislative session and adopted
a new map that “established a second majority-Black congressional
district to resolve the [Voting Rights Act] litigation.” Callais , v. Landry , ___ F. Supp. 3d ___, 2024 WL
1903930, *1 (WD La., Apr. 30, 2024). The result? A different group
of voters brought constitutional gerrymandering and vote-dilution
claims against the State. Id ., at *6-*7. That suit was also
successful. A District Court found that race predominated in
Louisiana's process of adding the second majority-minority
district, and enjoined the use of the new map. Id ., at *17,
*24. After the State argued that the proximity of the District
Court's order to important election deadlines would cause “election
chaos,” Emergency Application in No. 23A1002, p. 19, we stayed the
order, Order in No. 23A1002, 601 U. S. ___ (2024) (citing Purcell v. Gonzalez , 549 U.S. 1 (2006) ( per curiam )).

															As these cases make clear, this Court's
jurisprudence puts States in a lose-lose situation. Taken together,
our precedents stand for the rule that States must consider race just enough in drawing districts. And, what “just enough”
means depends on a federal court's answers to judicially
unanswerable questions about the proper way to apply the State's
traditional districting principles, or about the groupwide
preferences of racial minorities in the State. There is no density
of minority voters that this Court's jurisprudence cannot turn into
a constitutional controversy. We have extracted years of litigation
from every districting cycle, with little to show for it. The
Court's involvement in congressional districting is unjustified and
counterproductive.

															* * *

															“When, under our direction, federal courts are
engaged in methodologically carving the country into racially
designated electoral districts, it is imperative that we stop to
consider whether the course we have charted for the Nation is the
one” required by the Constitution. Holder , 512 U. S., at 945
(opinion of Thomas, J.). The Constitution provides courts no power
to draw districts, let alone any standards by which they can
attempt to do so. And, it does not authorize courts to engage in
the race-based reasoning that has come to dominate our
voting-rights precedents. It is well past time for the Court to
return these political issues where they belong—the political
branches. Notes 1 As the Court observes, the most
common direct evidence that a State considered race in drawing a
districting plan is the State's admission that it considered race
in order to comply with our Voting Rights Act precedents. Ante, at 3. 2 Congress has, at times, wielded
its power under the Elections Clause to impose compactness and
contiguity requirements for congressional districts. See, e . g ., Apportionment Act of 1842, ch. 47, 5 Stat. 491;
Apportionment Act of 1911, ch. 5, 37 Stat. 13. More recently, in
the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967, Congress required
the States to use single-member congressional districts instead of
at-large elections. See Pub. L. 90-196, 81 Stat. 581, 2 U. S. C.
§2c. And, Congress created a system for addressing a State's
failure to properly redistrict following a decennial census. See
§2a(c). Some Elections Clause legislation may give rise to
justiciable controversies regarding the application of federal
statutes. Cf. Wood v. Broom , 287 U.S.
1 , 8 (1932). But, constitutional districting claims are not
justiciable in and of themselves. 3 Other Clauses in §1 of the
Fourteenth Amendment fare no better. The Privileges or Immunities
Clause provides that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law
which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States.” It “grants 'United States citizens a certain
collection of rights— i . e ., privileges or
immunities—attributable to that status.' ” Ramos v. Louisiana , 590 U.S. 83, 138 (2020) (Thomas, J., concurring
in judgment) (quoting McDonald v. Chicago , 561 U.S.
742 , 808 (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring
in judgment)). And, the Citizenship Clause provides that “[a]ll
persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens
of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It
likely “guarantees citizens equal treatment . . . with respect to
civil rights.” Vaello Madero , 596 U. S., at 179 (opinion of
Thomas, J.). It is questionable whether the terms “privileges and
immunities” and “civil rights” were understood by the generation
that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment “to extend to political
rights, such as voting.” J. Harrison, Reconstructing the Privileges
or Immunities Clause, 101 Yale L. J. 1385, 1417 (1992). The Due
Process Clause, of course, is a nonstarter as a source for
substantive rights. See Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health
Organization , 597 U.S. 215, 330-336 (2022) (Thomas, J.,
concurring). SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															No. 22-807

															_________________

															THOMAS C. ALEXANDER, in his official capacity
as PRESIDENT OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA SENATE, et al., APPELLANTS v. THE SOUTH CAROLINA STATE CONFERENCE OF THE NAACP, et
al.

															on appeal from the united states district
court for the district of south carolina

															[May 23, 2024]

															Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Sotomayor and
Justice Jackson join, dissenting.

															This voting case, as the Court acknowledges,
turns on a quintessential factual dispute: Did South Carolina rely
on racial data to reconfigure the State's Congressional District 1?
The parties here agree that the South Carolina Legislature wanted
to make District 1 more Republican. They further agree that in
pursuit of that aim, the legislature moved nearly 200,000 people
into or out of the district. What the parties disagree about is how
the people expelled from the district were chosen. The State
contends that its mapmakers looked exclusively at data from the
last election and targeted people who had voted Democratic. If that
is true, the State's actions (however unsavory and undemocratic)
are immune from federal constitutional challenge. The Challengers,
though, offer a different account. They say that the mapmakers, not
content with what the election data revealed, also reviewed and
heavily relied on racial data—thus exploiting the well-known
correlation between race and voting behavior. And if that is true,
the Challengers have a good constitutional claim, because the Equal
Protection Clause forbids basing election districts mainly on race
in order to achieve partisan aims. See Cooper v. Harris , 581 U.S. 285, 291, and n. 1, 308, n. 7 (2017); Miller v. Johnson , 515 U.S.
900 , 914 (1995). So the key question again: In drawing District
1, did the mapmakers consider voting data alone, or did they also
closely attend and respond to which residents were Black and which
were White?

															A three-judge District Court undertook to
resolve that factual dispute. And the court, over nearly a year,
did everything one could ask to carry out its charge. After
overseeing broad discovery, the court held a 9-day trial, featuring
some two dozen witnesses and hundreds of exhibits. It evaluated
evidence about South Carolina geography and politics. It heard
first-hand testimony about the redistricting process. And it
considered the views of statistical experts on how the State's new
district lines could—and could not—have come about. In the end, the
court had to decide between two starkly different stories, backed
by opposing bodies of evidence. One side you know from having read
the majority opinion: The state officials repeatedly denied using
race in choosing the people kicked out of District 1, insisting
that they based their decisions on political data alone. The other
side you have not yet heard, except in the sketchiest of terms. It
is that the State's mapmakers were experienced and skilled in the
use of racial data to draw electoral maps; that they configured
their mapmaking software to show how any change made to the
district would affect its racial composition; that the racial
make-up they landed on was precisely what they needed, to the
decimal point, to achieve their partisan goals; and that their
politics-only story could not account, as a statistical matter, for
their large-scale exclusion of African-American citizens. Faced
with that proof, all three judges agreed: The Challengers' version
of events was the more credible. The court, to put the matter
bluntly, did not believe the state officials. It thought they had
gerrymandered District 1 by race.

															In reviewing those conclusions, the majority
goes seriously wrong. Factfinding about electoral districting, as
about other matters, is reversible “only for clear error.” Cooper , 591 U. S., at 293. This Court must give a district
court's view of events “significant deference,” which means we must
uphold it so long as it is “plausible.” Ibid. Under that
standard, South Carolina should now have to redraw District 1. As
I'll detail, the Challengers introduced more than enough evidence
of racial gerrymandering to support the District Court's judgment.
The majority's attempt to explain its contrary result fails at
every turn. The majority picks and chooses evidence to its liking;
ignores or minimizes less convenient proof; disdains the panel's
judgments about witness credibility; and makes a series of mistakes
about expert opinions. The majority declares that it knows better
than the District Court what happened in a South Carolina
map-drawing room to produce District 1. But the proof is in the
pudding: On page after page, the majority's opinion betrays its
distance from, and lack of familiarity with, the events and
evidence central to this case.

															Yet there is worse: The majority cannot begin to
justify its ruling on the facts without in two ways reworking the
law—each to impede racial-gerrymandering cases generally. First,
the majority, though ostensibly using the clear-error standard,
effectively inverts it whenever a trial court rules against a
redistricting State. In the majority's version, all the deference
that should go to the court's factual findings for the plaintiffs
instead goes to the losing defendant, because it is presumed to act
in good faith. See ante , at 5. So the wrong side gets the
benefit of the doubt: Any “possibility” that favors the State is
treated as “dispositive.” Ante , at 16. Second, the majority
invents a new rule of evidence to burden plaintiffs in
racial-gerrymandering cases. As of today, courts must draw an
adverse inference against those plaintiffs when they do not submit
a so-called alternative map—no matter how much proof of a
constitutional violation they otherwise present. See ante ,
at 30-31. Such micro-management of a plaintiff 's case is elsewhere
unheard of in constitutional litigation. But as with its
upside-down application of clear-error review, the majority is
intent on changing the usual rules when it comes to addressing
racial-gerrymandering claims.

															To be fair, we have seen all this once
before—except that it was in a dissent. Just seven years ago, this
Court decided another racial-gerrymandering case, strikingly
similar to this one. In Cooper v. Harris , the Court
rejected the State's request for an alternative-map requirement;
the dissent vehemently objected. See 581 U. S., at 318; id. ,
at 334-337 (Alito, J., dissenting). The Court applied normal
clear-error review, deferring to all plausible trial court
findings. See id. , at 293. The dissent, invoking a
presumption of good faith, instead deferred to all plausible
arguments of the losing State defendant. See id. , at 357
(Alito, J., dissenting). Today, for all practical purposes, the Cooper dissent becomes the law.

															Perhaps most dispiriting is what lies behind the
Court's new approach—its special rules to specially disadvantage
suits to remedy race-based redistricting. The Cooper dissent
thought plaintiffs would use racial-gerrymandering actions as
“weapons of political warfare.” Id. , at 335 (Alito, J.,
dissenting). And it lamented that courts finding gerrymanders were
“accus[ing]” States of “offensive and demeaning conduct.” Id. , at 334 (internal quotation marks omitted). So the
problem was more with challenging racial gerrymanders than with
putting them into place. Today, that view becomes central to the
majority opinion. See ante , at 6. The suspicion, and indeed
derision, of suits brought to stop racial gerrymanders are
self-evident; the intent to insulate States from those suits no
less so. But consider what this altered perspective misses. That a
State may in fact have engaged in such “offensive and demeaning”
conduct. That it may have sorted citizens by their race with
respect to the most fundamental of all their political rights. That
it may have done so for no reason other than to achieve partisan
gain. And here, that a three-judge court unanimously found all this
to have occurred.

															The proper response to this case is not to throw
up novel roadblocks enabling South Carolina to continue dividing
citizens along racial lines. It is to respect the plausible—no, the
more than plausible—findings of the District Court that the State
engaged in race-based districting. And to tell the State that it
must redraw District 1, this time without targeting
African-American citizens.

															I

															Begin with the law, and more particularly the
usual standard of review. This Court all the time recites the
words: “only for clear error.” Cooper , 581 U. S., at 293,
309. And those words always mean (or anyway, always meant) the same
thing. Under the clear-error standard, a lower court's factual
findings “warrant[ ] significant deference.” Id. , at 293. We
do not rubber stamp those findings, but we affirm them so long as
they are “plausible” in light of the full record. Anderson v. Bessemer City , 470 U.S.
564 , 574 (1985). And that is so even if, left to our own
devices, we “would have decided the [matter] differently.” Id. , at 573. We can reverse only when “left with the
definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed.” Ibid. And nowhere is that high bar higher than when witness
credibility is at issue. A trial court's judgment about whether a
witness is telling the truth is entitled to “singular deference.” Cooper , 581 U. S., at 309.

															The reasons for thus deferring to trial court
factfinding are equally well-settled. Trial courts are the
judiciary's factfinding specialists. They live with a case for
months or years, supervising discovery, ruling on the admission of
expert opinions, and watching how the evidence unfolds. They
preside over the trial and see the live witnesses (24 in this case)
up close. They can observe “the variations in demeanor and tone”
that “bear so heavily” on credibility judgments. Anderson ,
470 U. S., at 575. They know the ins and outs of often massive
records. (This case boasts, for example, a 2,122-page trial
transcript, a 1,694-page compilation of key deposition testimony,
and (as one judge remarked) too many exhibits to fit in the
courtroom. No. 3:21-cv-3302 (D SC), ECF Doc. 503, p. 23.) Chances
are, then, that a trial court will do better factfinding than an
appellate court parachuting in at the last moment. The clear-error
standard is a recognition of comparative competence. And it is a
forced dose of humility—a virtue which sometimes doesn't come
naturally to appellate courts. Apply that last point to this Court
in particular. The clear-error standard tells us that when we
disagree with a trial court's view of the facts, we are the ones
likely to be wrong. So we should make triple sure that we are
correcting, not creating, an error before we reverse. Cooper illustrates how the ordinary
clear-error standard works in districting litigation. The question
there, as here, was whether a state legislature chose voters for a
congressional district based on their race, or instead based on
their past political choices. The three-judge District Court found
that race accounted for the new district lines. On review, we
decided the evidence “adequately support[ed]” that conclusion. 581
U. S., at 309. As that phrasing suggests, we nowhere claimed the
court was actually right. To the contrary, we observed that in this
“thoroughly two-sided case,” both views of the evidence were
“plausible” and “permissible,” and we declined to choose between
them. Id. , at 299, 307, n. 6; see id. , at 316-317
(“Maybe we would have evaluated the testimony differently had we
presided over the trial; or then again, maybe we would not have”).
Our decision followed from the deference we thought owed to the
District Court. Under clear-error review, we noted, “we will not
take it upon ourselves to weigh the trial evidence as if we were
the first to hear it.” Id. , at 316. Because the District
Court's view was “plausible in light of the full record,” it “must
govern”—even if another were “equally or more so.” Id. , at
293 (internal quotation marks omitted).

															Today's decision could not be more different. To
be sure, the majority recites the clear-error standard. See ante , at 13. But from then on, the majority ignores it—no,
worse, does the opposite of what the standard commands. It is not
just that the majority refuses to defer to the District Court's
findings in favor of the Challengers. It is that the majority
defers to the assertions of the State defendants—the side that lost
below. Invoking a “presumption of legislative good faith,” the
majority insists that “when confronted with evidence that could
plausibly support multiple conclusions,” a court must “draw the
inference that cuts” in the State's favor. Ante , at 5. So
over and over the majority puts its thumb on the scale against the District Court. Each time it takes up a piece of
evidence, the majority declares that there is a “possibility” of
seeing it the State's way. Ante , at 16, 19. And that
possibility is “dispositive”; because of it, the State's version of
the facts must control. Ante , at 16; see also, e.g. , ante , at 5, 17, 22 (similarly awarding points to the State
because its claims were “plausible,” even if the Challengers' were
more so). In effect, the majority's demand for deference to the
State overrides clear-error review's call for deference to the
trial court. If the District Court wants deference, it had better
just rule for the State.

															That approach conflicts with this Court's
precedent. Indeed, it has only ever appeared in the Cooper .
. . dissent. There too, Justice Alito argued for reversing the
trial court's view of evidence because it was not “the only
plausible interpretation.” 581 U. S., at 357. There too, he called
for accepting the State's contrary view because the evidence could
“as easily be understood” that way. Ibid. ; see id. ,
at 345, 350, 352, 358-359. The Cooper Court noticed—and
disapproved. The dissent, it said, “repeatedly flips the
appropriate standard of review,” to give the State rather than the
trial court deference. Id. , at 309, n. 8. But that move
reflected “an elemental error”: There is no “super-charged,
pro-State presumption on appeal, trumping clear error review.” Ibid. Of course clear-error review takes into account the
standard of proof in the trial court. See ante , at 29-30, n.
11. But that standard is not transformed because of the good-faith
presumption. In our precedents, that presumption tells a court not
to assume a districting plan is flawed or to limit the State's
opportunities to defend it. See Abbott v. Perez , 585
U.S. 579, 603 (2018) (the presumption requires a plan's challengers
to bear the burden of proof ); Hunt v. Cromartie , 526 U.S.
541 , 553 (1999) (the presumption may suggest sending a case to
trial, rather than rejecting a plan on summary judgment). And the
presumption reminds a court that it is a serious matter to find a
State in breach of the Constitution. See Miller , 515 U. S.,
at 915. But that is all. Nothing in our decisions suggests that a
trial court must resolve every plausibly disputed factual issue for
the State (as if we could hardly imagine officials violating the
law). And still less do our decisions suggest that the trial
court's factual findings are deprived of deference on appeal. To
the contrary, as Cooper stated, clear-error review of those
findings proceeds just as usual, unaffected by the presumption. See
581 U. S., at 309, n. 8; see also Miller , 515 U. S., at 915
(good faith is presumed “ until a claimant makes a showing”
of “race-based decisionmaking” (emphasis added)).

															The majority's deeper reasons for specially
indulging the State also clash with this Court's decisions. In the
majority's view, claims of racial gerrymanders are often “weapons
of political warfare,” using courts for illegitimate ends. Ante , at 6. And when courts vindicate those claims, they
“accus[e]” States of “offensive and demeaning conduct,” bearing “an
uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid,” ibid. —an
apparently intolerable insult even when justified. Those
sentiments, again, come straight out of the dissent in Cooper . See 581 U. S., at 334-335. The Court there
took a different view, more reflective of our precedents. See id. , at 319, n. 15. Time and again, this Court has noted the
important role suits like this one play in stopping the unlawful
race-based division of citizens into electoral districts. See, e.g. , Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Bd. of
Elections , 580 U.S. 178, 187 (2017). For sorting of that kind
does occur—sometimes (as here) to serve partisan goals,
occasionally just to suppress the political influence of minority
voters. See Cooper , 581 U. S., at 319, n. 15. And when it
does, the Court has held, it requires a judicial response. See, e.g. , Shaw v. Reno , 509
U.S. 630 , 649 (1993). If calling out a racial gerrymander
“accus[es]” a State of a grave wrong, then so be it. This Court is
not supposed to be so fearful of telling discriminators, including
States, to stop discriminating. In other recent decisions, the
Court has prided itself on halting race-based decision-making
wherever it arises—even though serving far more commendable goals
than partisan advantage. See, e.g. , Students for Fair
Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard
College , 600 U.S. 181, 213-214 (2023). It is not the ordinary
thing to agonize so much about giving “offens[e]” to a
discriminating State. Ante , at 6.

															And it is not the right thing either. In
adopting its novel credit-the-losing-State approach, the majority
thwarts efforts to undo a pernicious kind of race-based
discrimination. See Shaw , 509 U. S., at 643 (recognizing
racial gerrymanders as “odious”). True enough, as the majority
highlights, that the judicial system fails when a State is wrongly
found to have gerrymandered a district. But the system fails as
badly or worse when a State that has gerrymandered a district gets
away with it. This Court has prohibited race-based gerrymanders for
a reason: They divide citizens on racial lines to engineer the
results of elections (without the justification of protecting
minority voters' rights). And litigation to remedy that harm is
already none too easy. Because of the complex political context,
this Court has required challengers of electoral maps to show that
race was not just a single but the “predominant” factor in moving
voters between districts. Bethune-Hill , 580 U. S., at 187.
That is, and is meant to be, a demanding burden. But once
plaintiffs have met it to a three-judge district court's
satisfaction, their hardest job should be done. They should not
have to face an upside-down form of clear-error review, in which
this Court reverses if it decides there is a “possibility” of
seeing the evidence the State's way. Ante , at 16. The
principal effect of that novel rule will be to defeat valid
voting-discrimination claims.

															And the majority is not yet done putting
uncommon burdens on gerrymandered plaintiffs. From now on, those
plaintiffs will also be subject to an “adverse inference” unless
they present a specific form of evidence—an “alternative map” that
would “achieve[ the State's] legitimate political objectives” while
“producing significantly greater racial balance.” Ante , at
30-31 (internal quotation marks omitted). And that inference gives
every sign of packing a wallop. The majority labels it “dispositive
in many, if not most, cases,” except when the plaintiff presents
(1) direct evidence of a gerrymander (say, an email admitting to
the targeting of Black voters) or (2) “some extraordinarily
powerful circumstantial evidence such as the strangely irregular
twenty-eight-sided district lines” in Gomillion v. Lightfoot , 364 U.S.
339 (1960). Ante , at 31 (internal quotation marks
omitted). Think about that last category, as the majority frames
it. The majority must go back 65 years, to the most grotesque
racial gerrymander in the U. S. Reports, to find a case based on
circumstantial evidence that could have survived its adverse
inference. How better to make the point: The majority's new
evidentiary rule is meant to scuttle gerrymandering cases.

															Odd that the majority fails to mention a
seemingly pertinent fact: Cooper expressly rejected a
similar demand that a plaintiff alleging a gerrymander submit an
alternative map. In that case, North Carolina argued that “[w]hen
race and politics are competing explanations of a district's
lines,” the challenger must introduce “an alternative map that
achieves the legislature's political objectives while improving
racial balance.” 581 U. S., at 317 (alterations omitted). The Cooper dissent agreed. See id. , at 332-337. The Cooper Court did not. See id. , at 317-322. The Court
freely acknowledged that such a map could be good evidence of a
racial gerrymander. See id. , at 317. So too, it recognized
“as a practical matter” that a plaintiff with an otherwise weak
case would not prevail without a map. Id. , at 319.[ 1 ] But we could not have been more
adamant in rebuffing the State's proposed requirement. “[I]n no
area of our equal protection law,” we reasoned, “have we forced
plaintiffs to submit one particular form of proof.” Ibid. And we were not about to start. A “plaintiff 's task” in a
gerrymander case, we stated, “is simply to persuade the trial
court—without any special evidentiary prerequisite”—that race was
the predominant factor in redistricting voters. Id. , at 318.
Like all other submissions in a gerrymandering case—the “testimony
of government officials,” proof about the data available to
mapmakers, and “expert analysis”—“[a]n alternative map is merely an
evidentiary tool.” Id. , at 318-319. So “neither [a map's]
presence nor its absence can itself resolve a racial gerrymandering
claim.” Id. , at 319.

															The majority cannot evade Cooper 's force
by casting today's holding as an “adverse inference” rule rather
than a simple requirement. First, there is precious little
difference between the two. Given the apparent strength of the
majority's adverse inference, few litigants will feel free to
proceed without commissioning alternative maps. The majority's
inference is effectively a requirement, whether or not it goes by
that label. And anyway, Cooper 's reasoning easily
encompasses—which is to say forbids—the majority's new inference
rule. The point in Cooper was to treat maps equivalently
to—rather than “elevate” them above—other forms of evidence. Id. , at 318. So if the plaintiff 's non-map evidence
supports a claim, the Court stated, the absence of a map “does not
matter.” Ibid. The Cooper dissent well understood the
point. No less than three times, the dissent quoted the Court's
“does not matter” line, arguing vociferously that a map's absence
should matter, if not in all cases, at least in all but
“exceptional ones.” Id. , at 336; see id. , at 329,
359. The dissent lost that battle, but now succeeds in overturning
the essence of Cooper 's map ruling.

															The majority-née-dissent's reasons for elevating
maps above other evidence have not improved since Cooper held to the contrary. The majority states that maps can serve as a
good way to undermine a State's “it was all politics” defense. See ante , at 30-31. No argument there: The Cooper Court
also said as much. 581 U. S., at 317. But it went on to say that
maps “are hardly the only means” of attacking such a
defense—as this case well shows. Id. , at 318; see infra , at 15-33. The majority also insists that plaintiffs
can “easily churn out” alternative maps at “little marginal cost.” Ante , at 30 (quoting, of course, the Cooper dissent).
Maybe or maybe not; either way, the Cooper Court said, the
matter is irrelevant: We have no “warrant to demand” that
plaintiffs jump through “evidentiary hoops” of our creation,
“whether the exercise would cost a hundred dollars or a million, a
week's more time or a year's,” if they can otherwise prove that
race predominated in drawing district lines. 581 U. S., at 319, n.
15.[ 2 ] Finally, the majority
suggests that all plaintiffs with serious gerrymandering cases
should have known to produce an alternative map. See ante ,
at 5. But that assertion requires airbrushing Cooper out of
our caselaw. What plaintiffs should have known after Cooper was that they could but need not submit an alternative map. The
majority today punishes the Challengers for thinking that this
Court would be good to its word.

															In any event, the Challengers had an
understandable reason for not offering the kind of map the majority
demands. The point of such a map, as the majority explains, is to
help figure out whether race or politics accounts for districting
lines. See ante , at 30-31. That function becomes
important—so a map makes sense—only if a State in fact defends its
plan as arising from political considerations. At trial, South
Carolina indeed adopted that defense. But it was not clear
beforehand, when the plaintiffs were developing their evidence for
trial, that the State would do so. The plain fact is, politicians
don't like admitting to partisan gerrymanders: They often deny them
as aggressively as they draw them. That is because “[e]xcessive
partisanship in districting” is-and is thought by voters to
be—“incompatible with democratic principles.” Rucho v. Common Cause , 588 U.S. 684, 718 (2019). So it is scarcely
surprising that, during legislative debate, the districting plan's
sponsor responded to charges of a partisan gerrymander by asserting
“that's really not the case.” J. S. A. Supp. 286a.[ 3 ] Or that during pretrial proceedings key
State witnesses continued to deny partisan motives. Luke Rankin,
the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, testified
in discovery that it was not “a goal of [his] to make”
District 1 “more reliably republican.” Id. , at 425a.
Likewise, a Republican member of the House Redistricting Committee
testified that he “never considered partisan gain as a goal” of
redistricting, and “never” heard “anyone else” admit that goal
either. Id. , at 409a-410a. And the Senate Redistricting
Subcommittee's counsel swore that there was “no effort” to make
District 1 “more Republican leaning.” Id. , at 392a. So the
Challengers, prior to trial, were not on notice of a partisanship
defense. The State, to be sure, changed tack in the end: A strong
case made by plaintiffs can powerfully concentrate a defendant's
mind. But by that time, the Challengers' mapmaker (Dr. Kosuke Imai)
had completed his work, and the trial had begun.

															Even before looking at the trial evidence, the
majority thus places the Challengers in a deep hole. Although this
Court recently disclaimed any need for an alternative map, the
majority today draws an adverse inference from such a map's
absence. And contrary to settled practice, the majority decrees
that, even on clear-error review of a ruling for the Challengers,
the State will emerge victorious if its version of events is so
much as possible . Combine those two facets of the majority's
approach, and the trial evidence fades into insignificance. A legal
twist here and a legal bend there ensure that the majority need
show no respect for the three-judge District Court's
well-considered factual findings.

															II

															Normal clear-error review would lead to a
different outcome. The District Court faced a factual question: Did
the State rely significantly on racial data in drawing its new
District 1? Based on the mountains of evidence presented, the court
decided that the State had done so. That finding was reasonable,
and deserves to be affirmed.

															As the majority explains, this case concerns
changes that South Carolina made in its most recent redistricting
to Congressional District 1. See ante , at 7-12. Under the
pre-existing map, District 1 was a thin strip of land stretching
along the Atlantic Coast. See Appendix, infra , at 35, Figure
1 (2011 Congressional Map). It was bordered to the northwest by
District 6, the State's only majority-Black district. See ibid. ; J. S. A. 429a. After the 2020 census, South Carolina
had to redraw both those districts to comply with the
Constitution's one-person, one-vote requirement. District 1 was
overpopulated by about 88,000 people, and District 6 was
underpopulated by about 85,000. The State chose, though, not to
make a one-way transfer of residents from the overpopulated to the
underpopulated district. To unite two counties, the State first
moved around 53,000 residents from (the underpopulated) District 6
into (the overpopulated) District 1. That shift, of course,
exacerbated the problem: The State now needed to transfer some
140,000 residents in the opposite direction. It did so mainly by
moving a large chunk of Charleston County from District 1 to
District 6.

															And here is the rub—the thing that created this
case. The part of the county that the legislature moved out of
District 1 was disproportionately Black, and by a lot. The
mapmakers targeted several heavily Black neighborhoods in North
Charleston, while leaving many heavily White neighborhoods alone.
See id. , at 261a-262a. And no matter how you slice the
numbers, the effects were stark. More than 60% of Black Charleston
County residents previously in District 1 were relocated to
District 6. 649 F. Supp. 3d 177, 189 (SC 2023). Of the 11 precincts
with the largest Black populations, 10 were gone. Ibid. Overall, the proportion of African Americans in the excised part of
the county (23.8%) was more than twice as high as in the remaining
part (10.3%). See id. , at 190; Supp. App. 153a. The upshot
was that 79% of Charleston County's Black population now found
itself in District 6, whereas only 53% had been there before. See
649 F. Supp. 3d, at 190, and n. 9. As the State's main mapmaker—and
star witness—acknowledged, the new lines created a “tremendous
[racial] disparity” in comparison to the old districting plan. J.
S. A. 262a; 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 189.

															The question at trial was how that disparity had
come about. By that time, the State had adopted its politics-only
defense. It argued, as the majority says, that the point of
redrawing District 1 was to “enhance[ ] the Republican advantage”
there— i.e. , to make sure a Democratic candidate could not
win. Ante , at 9. But that claim, even if true, would not be
enough for the State to prevail. As this Court has held, a State
cannot divide voters by race to achieve political ends. See Miller , 515 U. S., at 914. “[T]he sorting of voters on the
grounds of their race” is a constitutional problem “even if race is
meant to function as a proxy” for political affiliation. Cooper , 581 U. S., at 309, n. 7; see id. , at 291, and
n. 1. So the critical issue was not whether the State's ultimate
aim was political or racial (though the majority often phrases it
that way, see, e.g. , ante , at 1, 5, 17). Instead, the
issue was whether the State had advanced its partisan objective
primarily by racial means. The Challengers maintained that it had.
They said the State's mapmakers had consciously removed Black
citizens from District 1 on the (justified) assumption that doing
so would turn the district redder. The State, by contrast, denied
in any way using race to draw District 1's lines. According to its
account, the disproportionate removal of African Americans from
District 1 was just an accidental byproduct of political
sorting—more specifically, of ejecting precincts that had strongly
supported then-candidate Biden in the 2020 election.[ 4 ] Faced with those competing stories, the
District Court had to decide which to credit.

															The court's decision to credit the Challengers,
as I'll next show, was not clear error—indeed, far from it. There
was of course evidence pointing in each direction; like Cooper , this was a “two-sided case.” 581 U. S., at 307, n.
6. But the Challengers made a weighty showing that the mapmakers
relied substantially on racial data in moving voters around. The
mapmakers had the incentive to do so, given the limits of the
political information in their possession. They had the ability to
do so—both access to data and experience using it. And direct
testimony showed that the mapmakers had in fact continually
examined racial data during the line-drawing process. The map
yielded by that process hit on the dot the Black voting percentage
that state officials knew they needed to achieve their partisan
goal. And when statistics experts reviewed the map, they found that
the State's politics-only story could not explain the
redistricting's extreme racial disparity. In dismissing that strong
case, the majority cherry-picks evidence, ignores credibility
findings, misunderstands expert views, and substitutes its own
statistical theories. Its opinion gives not a whit of respect to
the District Court's factual findings, thus defying the demands of
clear-error review.

															A

															Start with the State's chief mapmaker. William
Roberts, as the majority notes, was a “nonpartisan staffer with 20
years of experience” drawing maps for Republicans and Democrats
alike. Ante , at 8-9. He was good at what he did—expert,
“helpful,” and “precise.” J. S. A. 74a, 254a. And also this—he was
a veteran consumer of racial data. On cross-examination, Roberts
testified as follows:

															Q: I think I heard the number of 75 to a
hundred localities you've worked in over the past 20 years?

															A: Yes. . . .

															Q: Before this redistricting cycle, you always
looked at race data in the 75 to a hundred districts you worked in,
correct?

															A: Yes. . . .

															Q: Indeed, . . . you provided guidance to
localities that they should be looking at BVAP [Black Voting-Age
Population] in drawing lines, correct?

															A: That's correct. Id. , at 204a-205a. The point of looking
at BVAP, according to the mapmaker's testimony, was not to suppress
the Black vote. Rather, Roberts stated that he did so to achieve a
panoply of lawful districting goals—like assessing Voting Rights
Act compliance and “help[ing] the general public understand the
race of voters getting moved in and out.” Id. , at 206a; see id. , at 205a. Whatever the particular purpose, he consulted
racial data constantly. Now as you know from the majority, Roberts
denied doing so in the redistricting at issue here. See ante , at 14-15. But when asked “so in your 20 years of
redistricting, this was the only time [that] you didn't look at
race?,” Roberts answered “That's correct.” J. S. A. 207a.

															True to his persistent practice (if not to his
this-case-only denial), Roberts configured maproom computers to
show how every line-drawing decision would affect the new District
1's racial make-up. In other words, as a mapmaker moved a district
line this way or that, he could immediately see the resulting
change in the district's BVAP. Displaying racial data in that way
was not an unavoidable feature of the mapmaking software. As one
staffer explained: “[Y]ou could configure” the computer setup “in a
multitude of ways.” ECF Doc. 462-9, at 114. You could make it so
that new BVAP numbers appeared on your screen “while you
manipulated geography”—but “there [was] no requirement that you
ha[d] to set it up that way.” Ibid. The mapmakers had to
choose to display racial data. And here is the key thing: They did.
A Senate staffer who often sat with Roberts in the maproom
explained that not only “political data” but also “demographic
data”—specifically, “race” and “voting age population by race”—was
“visible” on computer screens “[a] lot of the time.” ECF Doc.
462-4, at 40. And on cross-examination, Roberts admitted that to be
true:

															Q: So BVAP was visible on the screen while you
were drawing maps?

															A: Yeah. It was in the statistics window at the
bottom of the screen.

															Q: So, you could see BVAP as you were making
changes in real time as you were drawing lines?

															A: We could see the statistics update after a
change was made.

															Q: So, if you moved a district line, you could
see if the BVAP went up or down, right?

															A: You could see on the statistics what the
overall district BVAP would be.

															J. S. A. 207a; see J. S. A. Supp. 402a (another
staffer acknowledging: “Was I aware of, while I was drawing, what
the racial makeup of what I was drawing was? Yes”).

															So Roberts's testimony presented a puzzle. As
the majority highlights, Roberts consistently denied relying on
racial data. See, e.g. , ante , at 14-15, 17. But
racial data, according to both him and others, was easily
accessible—in fact, was usually visible—on his computer while the
line-drawing was going on. And he never explained why it was there.
Why configure a computer to tell you, at every stage of the
mapmaking process, how the slightest change in a district line
would affect Black voting-age population if you weren't tracking
and manipulating Black voting-age population? Roberts had no
answer.

															But there was an obvious reason for attending so
closely to racial data, as even the majority acknowledges: One
surefire way of making a South Carolina district more Republican is
to make it less Black. See ante , at 15-16. The difference
between a “Republican tilt” and a “Democratic tilt” in District 1,
notes the majority, is the difference between a 17% BVAP and a 21%
BVAP. Ibid. That is because in recent statewide elections,
more than 90% of Black South Carolina voters—and usually more than
95%—have supported the Democratic candidate. See J. S. A. Supp.
82a. In South Carolina, to remove a Black voter from a
congressional district is pretty nearly to remove a future
Democratic vote. That is no secret. So it is small wonder that
racial data was conspicuously displayed on Roberts's computer. And
then small wonder that the District Court found Roberts to have
used that data to draw district lines. See 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 191.
More doubt would properly have attached to the opposite finding—that Roberts put this hugely relevant data on his screen
only to ignore it as he worked to make District 1 more Republican.
That would have taken the self-restraint of a monk.

															Especially so because using only the political
data at hand would not have done the job as well. “Why,” the
majority asks, “would Roberts have used racial data” when he had
access to sub-precinct-level voting data from the 2020 election? Ante , at 18; see ante , at 33-34. The question is
apparently meant to be rhetorical; but the trial record provides a
ready answer—and one more than sufficient on clear-error review.
One of the Challengers' experts testified that “[t]he 2020 election
data” was “not a good” measure of partisan tilt—neither so
“accurate” nor so “reliable.” App. 135. And racial data, another
expert suggested, served the mapmakers' goal better. See id ., at 112. The single-sentence explanation is this: In
South Carolina, a Black voter is more likely to vote for a Democrat
in the next election than is someone who voted for a Democrat in
the last election. That is because White voting preferences in the
State are not as “stable” as Black voting preferences. Ibid. A White voter “might vote for a Democrat in one election” only to
vote “for a Republican in another.” Ibid. So to remove a
past Democratic voter (as contrasted with a Black voter) is not
necessarily to remove a future Democratic vote.[ 5 ] And the gap only widens for past presidential voters, like those who participated in the 2020
election. In presidential elections, one expert explained, more
people than usual switch party lines to “vote for the candidate”—a
trend that then-President Trump's candidacy may have further
amplified. Id. , at 135; see J. S. A. 382a. Given all that,
the South Carolina mapmakers' racial data was peculiarly
predictive: The single best thing Roberts and his staff could do to
increase the future Republican vote in District 1 was to exclude a
Black voter. That fact would not have meant they looked at racial
data alone; they also had the 2020 election data on their
computers. But the racial data offered a potent tool for ensuring
that District 1 would vote for a Republican in coming
elections.[ 6 ]

															And strong evidence showed, as the District
Court found, that the mapmakers wielded this tool—that they used
their racial data to meet the BVAP level needed to achieve their
partisan goal. Recall the large turnover of voters in District 1.
See supra , at 15. Some 53,000 people were moved into, and
140,000 people were moved out of, the district (which wound up with
730,000 total). Yet the district's racial balance did not budge.
The district began with a 16.6% BVAP. See J. S. A. 430a. That
number went up with the 53,000-person addition, because almost 40%
of the new residents were Black. See id. , at 439a. So what
did the mapmakers do? As noted earlier, they removed from District
1 over 60% of Black Charleston County residents, by excising a part
of the county more than twice as Black (23.8%) as the part they
kept in (10.3%). See 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 189-190; Supp. App. 153a; supra , at 16. That brought the district's BVAP right back
down to 16.7%—again below the 17% required to create the desired
Republican tilt. See J. S. A. 452a; 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 188. In the
majority's description, what happened was of no particular
note—just that the District's BVAP “stayed more or less constant.” Ante , at 15. But consider: With approximately a quarter of
District 1's population moving in or out, the district's BVAP
shifted by . . . one-tenth of one percentage point. The District
Court observed that uncanny stability, knowing that racial data was
at the mapmakers' fingertips. See 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 191. And the
court, as addressed shortly, had heard statistical experts deny
that the racially disparate districting could have come about
through political sorting. See infra , at 26-33. So it was no
large step—and hardly clear error—for the court to conclude that
the mapmakers had gerrymandered Charleston County to achieve “a
target of 17%” BVAP. 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 193.

															As against all that, what does the majority
offer? Only a series of self-serving denials. The sum and substance
of the State's case came from the testimony of Roberts and State
Senator George Campsen, who was the redistricting plan's sponsor.
Yes, the new map, Roberts conceded, had a “tremendous” racial skew.
J. S. A. 262a. But Roberts and Campsen maintained that they had
never sorted by race—never used their (constantly accessible)
racial data to draw district lines. Both insisted that they had
looked only to voting results from the 2020 election to ensure
their partisan goal. The majority buys it—hook, line, and sinker.
Indeed, the majority relies on nothing else. It treats Roberts's
and Campsen's account as a “fact of the matter,” rather than a
vigorously contested assertion. Cooper , 581 U. S., at 307,
n. 6; see, e.g. , ante , at 8-10. The majority trusts
the two State witnesses, and believes what they said.

															The problem is that the three judges who sat on
the District Court did not. And they are the ones entitled to make
credibility judgments. See supra , at 5; Cooper , 581
U. S., at 309 (“[W]e give singular deference to a trial court's
judgments about the credibility of witnesses”). That is for an
obvious reason: They were there. They could assess every aspect of
a witness's testimony, including demeanor, tone of voice, and
facial expression. They could see when the witness was at ease and
when he stumbled. And after taking account of all those cues, the
three judges all reached the same conclusion about Roberts and
Campsen. They thought that those two witnesses were not telling the
truth.

															The panel was especially disbelieving of
Roberts, if almost in spite of itself. The court (contra the
majority) well understood what the presumption of good faith
required. The judges were predisposed, as the majority has to
acknowledge, to think that this “good man,” who had for so long
been a fixture on the South Carolina political scene, would play it
straight. Ante , at 8-9, and n. 5 (citing J. S. A. 23a,
74a-75a, 254a, 263a, 421a). But in the end, the court felt
compelled to find that Roberts's old habit of relying on race died
hard. To the panel, the mapmaker's tale did not hang together. He
said he did not consider race in drawing lines; but he could recite
“off the top of his head” the racial breakdown of particular
precincts in District 1. 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 191. Those “highly
accurate” estimates, the court noted, reflected Roberts's obvious
knowledge of “the racial demographics of the state down to the
individual precinct level.” Ibid. , n. 12. And Roberts never
did—never could—explain why he put so much racial data on his
computer screen if not to look at it as he drew district lines.
Especially given the surrounding evidence, the court found,
Roberts's “claim that he did not consider race” in excluding voters
from District 1 “rings hollow.” Id. , at 191 (internal
quotation marks omitted). On normal clear-error review, that
credibility judgment would control.

															And so too for Campsen, who obfuscated at every
turn. At trial, Campsen reversed his own deposition testimony about
whether state senators knew the racial makeup of their districts.
(First they knew, then he couldn't possibly speak for them.) See J.
S. A. 377a-378a. He answered as simple a question as whether “race
and party are correlated in South Carolina” this way:

															“Yes—well, yes and no. I guess that's
fluid. It is fluid, but yes. . . . Well, it's not in every
instance, but generally African Americans tend to vote higher, you
know, more—you can look at the polls—when you look at the numbers
after the fact—I didn't look at them drawing the map—but you see
that in the numbers.” Id. , at 381a.

															And he contradicted common knowledge—as well as
the State's own defense—when he point-blank denied that sorting
people based on their voting behavior could result in racial
disparities. See id. , at 383a (“Q: You would agree with me
that if you . . . focus on partisan numbers, there's a risk that
you might disproportionately impact Black voters in drawing lines,
right? A: No, I'm not going to agree with that”). Would you buy
what this man was selling? As the contradictions, non-answers, and
evasions mounted, the District Court quite reasonably decided that
it could not.

															Put all this together, and the Challengers
offered—even before getting to their statistical studies—a more
than plausible case of racial gerrymandering. They showed that the
exclusion of voters from District 1 was racially
disproportionate—not by a little but by a lot. They showed that the
State's star mapmaker had always—always—before considered race in
drawing district lines. They showed why he would want to do so
here, to create a reliable Republican tilt. They showed that the
mapmaker configured his computer to exhibit in real time how every
adjustment of a district line affected the district's racial
make-up. And they showed that after moving nearly 200,000 residents
this way and that, the mapmaker managed to land on the exact BVAP
figure he knew would ensure his political goal. Now it is true that
the State, when confronted with this evidence, did not confess
error, as the majority comes close to demanding. Its officials, as
you might expect, adamantly disputed the charge of racial
discrimination. But they could not keep their story straight or
make it believable to three judges. The more the officials talked,
the more the court became convinced that, to create a red District
1, they had divided citizens by race. And that, again, was even
before the statisticians took center stage.

															B

															Once the statisticians did so, the
Challengers' case was clinched—at the least, from a clear-error
perspective. Consider how much the controverted issue lent itself
to statistical evidence. That issue began with a simple fact: The
part of Charleston County that the mapmakers excised from District
1 was (vastly) disproportionately Black. The dispute was about what
caused that disparity. Statistical evidence showing that it could
have arisen from political sorting would significantly benefit the
State's defense. Conversely, statistical evidence showing that the
racial disparity could not have arisen in that way would
significantly benefit the Challengers' case. So you might think
that the trial would feature a war of statistical experts, each
presenting their own multivariate regressions. But you would be
wrong. The Challengers did their part, but the State failed to
respond in kind. Rather than submit its own statistical studies,
the State devoted all its efforts to trying to pick apart the
Challengers'. It thus anticipated today's majority, which (given
the unbalanced record) can do nothing more than search for holes,
however minute, in the Challengers' expert evidence. But two
separate studies emerge unscathed, and with significant probative
force—fully sufficient on clear-error review to justify the
District Court's conclusion. Each analysis was designed to answer
the critical question: whether Charleston County was split as it
was based on its residents' race. And each found that it was. Even
controlling for political preference, Black voters were more likely
than White voters to be removed from District 1.[ 7 ]

															Dr. Jordan Ragusa's regression found that race,
separate and apart from partisanship, was “an important factor in
the design of the 1st district.” J. S. A. 509a; see 649 F. Supp.
3d, at 192. Ragusa looked at the size, racial demographics, and
partisan composition of each precinct in the old District 1. (His
measure of partisanship was the vote count for then-candidate Biden
in the 2020 election, which mirrored the political data the State's
mapmakers possessed.) By controlling for all three of those
variables, Ragusa explained, he could “statistically disentangle
the effect of each factor.” J. S. A. 505a. And when he did so,
Ragusa determined that “the decision to move a [precinct] out of
[District 1] was highly correlated to the number of African
American voters” in the precinct. 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 192; see J.
S. A. 508a-509a, 514a. If, for example, a precinct had 100 to 500
Black voters, “the chance of [its] being moved out” of District 1
was “no greater than 20%.” 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 192. But as the
number climbed, so did the likelihood: When a district had 1,500
Black voters, the probability of exclusion reached 60%. See ibid. And on top of that analysis, Ragusa directly compared
the effects of partisanship and race on the exclusion decision. He
found that the mapmakers removed 41% of precincts with more than
1,000 Biden voters, but 62% of precincts with more than 1,000 Black
voters. See J. S. A. Supp. 14a. That comparison showed that “the
racial composition of a precinct was a stronger predictor of
whether it was removed” from District 1 “than its partisan
composition.” Ibid. ; see 649 F. Supp. 3d, at 192.

															A second expert, Dr. Baodong Liu, reinforced
Ragusa's conclusions about the significance of race, using a
complementary methodology and data set. Liu evaluated the different
likelihoods that White Democrats and Black Democrats would wind up
outside or inside District 1. Based on demographic data and vote
tabulations from the 2018 Democratic primary, Liu first found that
Black Democrats were moved out of District 1 disproportionately to
White Democrats. Whereas 26% of Black Democrats in the district
were excluded, only 19% of White Democrats were; so the rate at
which Black Democrats were excluded was more than one-third higher.
See J. S. A. Supp. 94a. And then Liu sliced his data another way,
which confirmed his results. Replicating a methodology that this
Court approved in Cooper , see 581 U. S., at 315, Liu looked
at Democratic voters in all the counties that at least partly
overlapped with District 1. Which of those voters, Liu asked,
actually wound up in District 1 and which did not? Once again, the
answer showed a significant racial disproportion. Whereas 69% of
White Democrats in the region were placed in the new District 1,
only 51% of Black Democrats were put there. J. S. A. Supp.
100a.

															The majority's primary objection to Ragusa's and
Liu's studies—that they did not “control for contiguity or
compactness,” ante , at 23, 27—is woefully misplaced. The
gripe is that the experts assumed “unrealistic[ally]” that any
precinct, no matter where located, could be moved. Ante , at
23. If the experts had thought about geography, the majority
suggests, they might have found that Black Democrats were
disproportionately relocated because they lived in precincts closer
to a district boundary. The argument is reprised from Cooper —but (what a surprise) only from the dissent. See 581
U. S., at 358. And the reason the objection got nowhere in Cooper applies once again. The relevant district in Cooper was super-thin, so that the lion's share of precincts
within it were close enough to a boundary line to be easily moved.
See id. , at 326. And so too here. Recall that the only issue
under review is whether the State improperly moved Black voters
from District 1 to District 6—because that is the only gerrymander
the District Court found. Now turn to the map of South Carolina's
old districts in this opinion's Appendix. District 1 was a narrow
strip on the Atlantic coast; District 6 ran along its whole length.
Nearly everyone within District 1 lived close to the border line;
so nearly everyone could have been sent to District 6, consistent
with contiguity and compactness. That is true even of people who
lived on the beach. Under the State's districting guidelines,
“[c]ontiguity by water is sufficient,” so the mapmakers could—and
in fact did—split the new District 1's land area by pulling
District 6 all the way to the water. J. S. A. 541a; see Appendix, infra , at 35, Figure 2 (Inset to 2022 Congressional Map).
The upshot is that precinct location did not meaningfully constrain
the State's choice of which voters to move from District 1 to
District 6. And so the Challengers' experts were not required to
pretend that it did.[ 8 ]

															That is why the majority, to support its
contiguity theory, must use a “simple example” of zero relevance to
this case. Ante , at 23. Says the majority: District 6
“precincts near [Colleton C]ounty's northern border with Bamberg
County could not have been moved into District 1 without
egregiously flouting the State's important interests in contiguity
or compactness.” Ante , at 24. That is true: As the map
shows, District 6 is fat, and the precincts the majority mentions
are far away from the District 1-District 6 line. See Appendix, infra , at 35, Figure 1. But of course this case has nothing
to do with those outermost District 6 precincts, or even with the
closer-in District 6 precincts that could have been moved into District 1. The sole issue here, again, is whether the
State disproportionately selected heavily African-American
precincts to move out of District 1. When it gets around to
that issue, the majority says: “[T]he same problem” as in its
example “arises with respect to the question whether a precinct in
District 1 . . . could have been moved into District 6.” Ante , at 24. But that is not true, for self-evident reasons.
As just described—and shown on the map—the old District 1 was thin,
and the great bulk of its precincts were close to the District
1-District 6 line. See Appendix, infra , at 35, Figure 1. So
they could have been moved “without egregiously flouting”—actually,
without flouting at all—“the State's important interests in
contiguity or compactness.” Ante , at 24. The majority's
inapt comparison is revelatory in one sense only: It shows why
appellate courts are supposed to use a clear-error standard—to make
sure we are fixing, not introducing, mistakes.

															The majority's other main criticism, aimed
solely at Ragusa, is original to this Court: It was never raised or
considered below (or, as far as I know, in other voting suits). The
objection relates to the way Ragusa measured each precinct's
partisan tilt. He asked how many 2020 Biden voters lived in a
precinct relative to its voting-age population. So, for example, a
1,250-person precinct with 700 Biden voters would count as much
more Democratic than the same-sized precinct with 350 Biden voters.
The majority says that measure may be “statistically
permissible”—but still is not good enough. Ante , at 26. In
the majority's view, Ragusa should have “account[ed] for” potential
variance in precinct turnout by looking to the Biden net vote
instead of the Biden total vote. Ante , at 25-26. Now I'll
admit: I'm not a statistician. I can see what the majority is
saying, but my inclination would be to seek out other
opinions—including from Ragusa himself—about the net-vote approach,
and whether it would matter. The problem is I can't do that here.
The theory is the majority's brainchild, absent from the District
Court's proceedings. The State never asked Ragusa about it, before
or during trial. The State's own expert did not bring it up. The
State did not raise it in briefing below. And most important:
Nothing in the trial record suggests that adopting the net-vote
measure would have made a real difference. The majority, to show
you why it might, offers what it calls a “simplified” example. Ante , at 25. For simplified read “fictional”—meaning, not
reflective of any actual precinct's vote. And for simplified, also
read “unrepresentative”? To take just one example: Maybe there are
some, but I doubt there are many, precincts in which 1,100 of 1,250
voting-age people make it to the polls. See ante , at 26. A
number of things about precinct composition and turnout would need
to be true for the net-vote/total-vote distinction to make a
significant difference to Ragusa's analysis—and we know none of
them. Sure, it's fun to play armchair statistician. But it's
irresponsible to reverse a trial court's decision—on clear-error
review—based on such hypothesizing.

															A couple of final attacks fare no better. The
majority faults Liu for testing partisan tilt in District 1 with
data from the 2018 gubernatorial primaries, rather than the 2020
presidential election. The majority confidently declares that
because an off-year primary has a lower turnout, the “[d]ata from
[it] is less informative.” Ante , at 28. Liu's explanation is
deemed unworthy of mention. It was that the higher turnout of a
presidential election, along with its greater focus on individual
candidates, makes it a poorer measure of a district's year-in,
year-out partisan tilt. See App. 135. The State's own expert did
not contest that view, so the majority's skepticism again finds no
support in the trial record. And even if 2020 data is better than
2018 data—it might be—what is better than either is both. That is
what the Challengers had: Ragusa's study based on 2020 data and
Liu's based on 2018 data, each showing a racial gerrymander.

															Much the same thing is true as to a more obscure
methodological issue the majority raises (again, needless to say, sua sponte ): whether statistical analysis should “operate[ ]
at the voter level” or the precinct level. Ante , at 27, n.
9. Here, the majority cannot get its attack-line consistent. First
the majority claims that Ragusa's testimony was worse than the
expert's in Cooper because Ragusa's relied on
“precinct-level analysis” rather than looking at individual voters. Ibid . But within a page the majority asserts that Liu's
study was “highly unrealistic” because he “treated each voter as an
independent unit” rather than considering “neighbors” together. Ante , at 27-28. So an expert challenging a gerrymander can't
win either way. But put that aside; the key thing, once more, is
that the Challengers had not one but two types of analysis working
in their favor. However a statistician looked at the data—whether
voter-level or precinct-level—he reached the same conclusion: that
the State's mapmakers targeted Black voters.

															And the State offered little by way of rebuttal.
It, too, had an expert witness. And that witness, Sean Trende, took
a couple of shots at Ragusa's methods. See ECF Doc. 510, at 46-52.
But he did not offer the most relevant kind of evidence—a
counter-analysis showing that partisanship subsumed race in the
design of District 1. Trende had access to all the same data Ragusa
did. He even had access to Ragusa's computer code, so that he would
not have needed to start from scratch. See id. , at 58. He
could just have rerun the code after fixing whatever variables he
thought wrong. What should one make of Trende's failure to do so?
If I were adopting the majority's methods, I would draw an “adverse
inference” from the decision not to submit such “easily churn[ed]
out” evidence. Ante , at 30. Surely it must count as an
“implicit concession” by the State that the statistical analysis,
even with the desired fixes, would keep showing evidence of a
racial gerrymander? Ante , at 31. But I don't need to create
a novel adverse inference to make the critical point. It was hardly
clear error for the District Court to credit the Challengers'
statistical evidence about race's predominant role when the State
presented no similar evidence to support its partisanship theory.
The majority's contrary view—that the State's nothing necessarily
beat the Challengers' something—is one more tell that it has left
the proper review standard way behind.

															III

															In every way, the majority today stacks the
deck against the Challengers. They must lose, the majority says,
because the State had a “possible” story to tell about not
considering race—even if the opposite story was the more credible. Ante , at 16. And they must lose again, the majority says,
because they failed to offer a particular form of proof—which they
did not know would be relevant and which this Court recently told
plaintiffs was not required. It does not matter that the
Challengers offered extensive evidence, including expert
statistical analyses, that the State's districting plan was the
product of racial sorting. It does not matter that the State, by
way of response, offered little more than strained and awkward
denials. It does not matter that three judges—entitled to respect
for their factual findings—thought that those denials were not
believable, and did not put a dent in the plaintiffs' proof. When
racial classifications in voting are at issue, the majority says,
every doubt must be resolved in favor of the State, lest (heaven
forfend) it be “accus[ed]” of “offensive and demeaning” conduct. Ante , at 6.

															What a message to send to state legislators and
mapmakers about racial gerrymandering. For reasons I've addressed,
those actors will often have an incentive to use race as a proxy to
achieve partisan ends. See supra , at 20-22. And occasionally
they might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of
minority voters. See Cooper , 581 U. S., at 319, n. 15. Go
right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you
have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply
with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you
are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan
gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in
another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end:
Just raise a “possibility” of non-race-based decision-making, and
it will be “dispositive.” Ante , at 16. And so this “odious”
practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and
exploiting racial divisions, will continue. Shaw , 509 U. S.,
at 643. In the electoral sphere especially, where “ugly patterns of
pervasive racial discrimination” have so long governed, we should
demand better—of ourselves, of our political representatives, and
most of all of this Court. Id. , at 639. Respectfully, I
dissent.

Summary: The Supreme Court case Thomas C. Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP revolves around the issue of redistricting and the role of race in the process. The Court ruled that while redistricting is a matter for state legislatures, racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional unless it can be justified by the state. The majority opinion, written by Justice Alito, reversed the lower court's decision, arguing that the legislature's redistricting decisions should be presumed to be made in good faith. The dissent, on the other hand, expressed concern that the majority decision would allow state legislators to use race as a proxy for partisan gain during redistricting.