30 COOPER v. HARRIS Opinion of the Court credible testimony from political figures and statements made in a §5 preclearance submission—plus circumstantial evidence that redistricters had access to racial, but not political, data at the “block-by-block level” needed to explain their “intricate” designs. See 517 U. S., at 960–963 (plurality opinion). Not a single Member of the Court thought that the absence of a counter-map made any difference. Similarly, it does not matter in this case, where the plaintiffs’ introduction of mostly direct and some circumstantial evidence—documents issued in the redistricting process, testimony of government officials, expert analysis of demographic patterns—gave the District Court a sufficient basis, sans any map, to resolve the race-or-politics question. A plaintiff ’s task, in other words, is simply to persuade the trial court—without any special evidentiary prerequisite—that race (not politics) was the “predominant consideration in deciding to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district.” Alabama, 575 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4) (internal quotation marks omitted); cf. Bethune-Hill, 580 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 8, 10) (rejecting a similar effort to elevate one form of “persuasive circumstantial evidence” in a dispute respecting racial predominance to a “mandatory precondition” or “threshold requirement” of proof). That burden of proof, we have often held, is “demanding.” E.g., Cromartie II, 532 U. S., at 241. And because that is so, a plaintiff will sometimes need an alternative map, as a practical matter, to make his case. But in no area of our equal protection law have we forced plaintiffs to submit one particular form of proof to prevail. See Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252, 266–268 (1977) (offering a varied and non-exhaustive list of “subjects of proper inquiry in determining whether racially discriminatory intent existed”). Nor would it make sense to do so here. The Equal Protection Clause prohibits the unjusti-