16 COOPER v. HARRIS Opinion of the Court And that absence is no accident: Rucho and Lewis proceeded under a wholly different theory—arising not from Gingles but from Bartlett v. Strickland—of what §2 demanded in drawing District 1. Strickland involved a geographic area in which African-Americans could not form a majority of a reasonably compact district. See 556 U. S., at 8 (plurality opinion). The African-American community, however, was sizable enough to enable the formation of a crossover district, in which a substantial bloc of black voters, if receiving help from some white ones, could elect the candidates of their choice. See supra, at 14. A plurality of this Court, invoking the first Gingles precondition, held that §2 did not require creating that district: When a minority group is not sufficiently large to make up a majority in a reasonably shaped district, §2 simply does not apply. See 556 U. S., at 18–20. Over and over in the legislative record, Rucho and Lewis cited Strickland as mandating a 50%-plus BVAP in District 1. See App. 355–356, 363–364, 472–474, 609–610, 619, 1044. They apparently reasoned that if, as Strickland held, §2 does not require crossover districts (for groups insufficiently large under Gingles), then §2 also cannot be satisfied by crossover districts (for groups in fact meeting Gingles’ size condition). In effect, they concluded, whenever a legislature can draw a majority-minority district, it must do so— even if a crossover district would also allow the minority —————— the experts opined (to no one’s great surprise) that in North Carolina, as in most States, there are discernible, non-random relationships between race and voting. But as the District Court found, see Harris v. McCrory, 159 F. Supp. 3d 600, 624 (MDNC 2016), that generalized conclusion fails to meaningfully (or indeed, at all) address the relevant local question: whether, in a new version of District 1 created without a focus on race, black voters would encounter “sufficient[ ]” white blocvoting to “cancel [their] ability to elect representatives of their choice,” Gingles, 478 U. S., at 56. And so the reports do not answer whether the legislature needed to boost District 1’s BVAP to avoid potential §2 liability.