14 COOPER v. HARRIS Opinion of the Court candidate of choice received 59% of the total vote; in other years, the share of the vote garnered by those candidates rose to as much as 70%. See supra, at 5. Those victories (indeed, landslides) occurred because the district’s white population did not “vote[ ] sufficiently as a bloc” to thwart black voters’ preference, Gingles, 478 U. S., at 51; rather, a meaningful number of white voters joined a politically cohesive black community to elect that group’s favored candidate. In the lingo of voting law, District 1 functioned, election year in and election year out, as a “crossover” district, in which members of the majority help a “large enough” minority to elect its candidate of choice. Bartlett v. Strickland, 556 U. S. 1, 13 (2009) (plurality opinion). When voters act in that way, “[i]t is difficult to see how the majority-bloc-voting requirement could be met”—and hence how §2 liability could be established. Id., at 16. So experience gave the State no reason to think that the VRA required it to ramp up District 1’s BVAP. The State counters that, in this context, past performance is no guarantee of future results. See Brief for Appellants 57–58; Reply Brief 19–20. Recall here that the State had to redraw its whole congressional map following the 2010 census. See supra, at 5. And in particular, the State had to add nearly 100,000 new people to District 1 to meet the one-person-one-vote standard. See supra, at 6. That meant about 13% of the voters in the new district would never have voted there before. See App. 2690; Reply Brief 20. So, North Carolina contends, the question facing the state mapmakers was not whether the thenexisting District 1 violated §2. Rather, the question was whether the future District 1 would do so if drawn without regard to race. And that issue, the State claims, could not be resolved by “focusing myopically on past elections.” Id., at 19. But that reasoning, taken alone, cannot justify North Carolina’s race-based redesign of District 1. True enough,