Cite as: 581 U. S. ____ (2017)
5
Opinion of the Court
Id., at 906; see id., at 911–918.
The next year, the State responded with a new districting plan, including a new District 12—and residents of
that district brought another lawsuit alleging an impermissible racial gerrymander. A District Court sustained
the claim twice, but both times this Court reversed. See
Hunt v. Cromartie, 526 U. S. 541 (1999) (Cromartie I );
Cromartie II, 532 U. S. 234. Racial considerations, we
held, did not predominate in designing the revised District
12. Rather, that district was the result of a political gerrymander—an effort to engineer, mostly “without regard
to race,” a safe Democratic seat. Id., at 245.
The State redrew its congressional districts again in
2001, to account for population changes revealed in the
prior year’s census. Under the 2001 map, which went
unchallenged in court, neither District 1 nor District 12
had a black voting-age population (called a “BVAP”) that
was a majority of the whole: The former had a BVAP of
around 48%, the latter a BVAP of around 43%. See App.
312, 503. Nonetheless, in five successive general elections
conducted in those reconfigured districts, all the candidates preferred by most African-American voters won
their contests—and by some handy margins. In District 1,
black voters’ candidates of choice garnered as much as
70% of the total vote, and never less than 59%. See 5
Record 636, 638, 641, 645, 647 (Pls. Exh. 112). And in
District 12, those candidates won with 72% of the vote at
the high end and 64% at the low. See id., at 637, 640, 643,
646, 650.
Another census, in 2010, necessitated yet another congressional map—(finally) the one at issue in this case.
State Senator Robert Rucho and State Representative
David Lewis, both Republicans, chaired the two committees jointly responsible for preparing the revamped plan.
They hired Dr. Thomas Hofeller, a veteran political mapmaker, to assist them in redrawing district lines. Several