Cite as: 581 U. S. ____ (2017) 5 Syllabus preparing the revamped plan—publicly stated that racial considerations lay behind District 12’s augmented BVAP. Specifically, Rucho and Lewis explained that because part of Guilford County, a jurisdiction covered by §5 of the VRA, lay in the district, they had increased the district’s BVAP to ensure preclearance of the plan. Dr. Thomas Hofeller, their hired mapmaker, confirmed that intent. The State’s preclearance submission to the Justice Department indicated a similar determination to concentrate black voters in District 12. And, in testimony that the District Court found credible, Congressman Mel Watt testified that Rucho disclosed a majority-minority target to him in 2011. Hofeller testified that he had drawn District 12’s lines based on political data, and that he checked the racial data only after he drew a politics-based line between adjacent areas in Guilford County. But the District Court disbelieved Hofeller’s asserted indifference to the new district’s racial composition, pointing to his contrary deposition testimony and a significant contradiction in his trial testimony. Finally, an expert report lent circumstantial support to the plaintiffs’ case, showing that, regardless of party, a black voter in the region was three to four times more likely than a white voter to cast a ballot within District 12’s borders. The District Court’s assessment that all this evidence proved racial predominance clears the bar of clear error review. Maybe this Court would have evaluated the testimony differently had it presided over the trial; or then again, maybe it would not have. Either way, the Court is far from having a “definite and firm conviction” that the District Court made a mistake in concluding from the record before it that racial considerations predominated in District 12’s design. Pp. 21–28. (c) Finally, North Carolina argues that when race and politics are competing explanations of a district’s lines, plaintiffs must introduce an alternative map that achieves a State’s asserted political goals while improving racial balance. Such a map can serve as key evidence in a race-versus-politics dispute, but it is hardly the only means to disprove a State’s contention that politics drove a district’s lines. In this case, the plaintiffs’ introduction of mostly direct and some circumstantial evidence gave the District Court a sufficient basis, sans any map, to resolve the race-or-politics question. Although a plaintiff will sometimes need an alternative map, as a practical matter, to make his case, such a map is merely an evidentiary tool to show that an equal protection violation has occurred; neither its presence nor its absence can itself resolve a racial gerrymandering claim. North Carolina claims that a passage of this Court’s opinion in Cromartie II makes an alternative map essential in cases like this