Cite as: 581 U. S. ____ (2017) 19 Opinion of the Court Getting to the bottom of a dispute like this one poses special challenges for a trial court. In the more usual case alleging a racial gerrymander—where no one has raised a partisanship defense—the court can make real headway by exploring the challenged district’s conformity to traditional districting principles, such as compactness and respect for county lines. In Shaw II, for example, this Court emphasized the “highly irregular” shape of thenDistrict 12 in concluding that race predominated in its design. 517 U. S., at 905 (internal quotation marks omitted). But such evidence loses much of its value when the State asserts partisanship as a defense, because a bizarre shape—as of the new District 12—can arise from a “political motivation” as well as a racial one. Cromartie I, 526 U. S., at 547, n. 3. And crucially, political and racial reasons are capable of yielding similar oddities in a district’s boundaries. That is because, of course, “racial identification is highly correlated with political affiliation.” Cromartie II, 532 U. S., at 243. As a result of those redistricting realities, a trial court has a formidable task: It must make “a sensitive inquiry” into all “circumstantial and direct evidence of intent” to assess whether the plaintiffs have managed to disentangle race from politics and —————— primarily on factual grounds). By contrast, the dissent consistently treats the State’s version of events (what it calls “the Legislature’s political strategy and the relationship between that strategy and [District 12’s] racial composition,” post, at 20) as if it were a simple “fact of the matter”—the premise of, rather than a contested claim in, this case. See post, at 12–14, 16, 20, 26, 27–29, 33. The dissent’s narrative thus tracks, top-to-bottom and point-for-point, the testimony of Dr. Hofeller, the State’s star witness at trial—so much so that the dissent could just have block-quoted that portion of the transcript and saved itself a fair bit of trouble. Compare post, at 12–20, with App. 2671– 2755. Imagine (to update the dissent’s theatrical reference) Inherit the Wind retold solely from the perspective of William Jennings Bryan, with nary a thought given to the competing viewpoint of Clarence Darrow.