Cite as: 581 U. S. ____ (2017) 33 Opinion of the Court had adopted that rule, it would have had no need to weigh each piece of evidence in the case and determine whether, taken together, they were “adequate” to show “the predominance of race in the legislature’s line-drawing process.” 532 U. S., at 243–244. But that is exactly what Cromartie II did, over a span of 20 pages and in exhaustive detail. Item by item, the Court discussed and dismantled the supposed proof, both direct and circumstantial, of race-based redistricting. All that careful analysis would have been superfluous—that dogged effort wasted—if the Court viewed the absence or inadequacy of a single form of evidence as necessarily dooming a gerrymandering claim. Rightly understood, the passage from Cromartie II had a different and narrower point, arising from and reflecting the evidence offered in that case. The direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, we thought, was extremely weak: We said of one piece that it “says little or nothing about whether race played a predominant role” in drawing district lines; we said of another that it “is less persuasive than the kinds of direct evidence we have found significant in other redistricting cases.” Id., at 253–254 (emphasis deleted). Nor did the report of the plaintiffs’ expert impress us overmuch: In our view, it “offer[ed] little insight into the legislature’s true motive.” Id., at 248. That left a set of arguments of the would-have-could-have variety. For example, the plaintiffs offered several maps purporting to “show how the legislature might have swapped” some mostly black and mostly white precincts to obtain greater racial balance “without harming [the legislature’s] political objective.” Id., at 255 (internal quotation marks omitted). But the Court determined that none of those proposed exchanges would have worked as advertised— essentially, that the plaintiffs’ “you could have redistricted differently” arguments failed on their own terms. See id., at 254–257. Hence emerged the demand quoted above, for maps that would actually show what the plaintiffs’ had