40 ABBOTT v. PEREZ Opinion of the Court Romero, Jr., beat Burnam by 110 votes. See Brief for Appellants 70. These election returns may be suggestive, but standing alone, they were not enough to give the State good reason to conclude that it had to alter the district’s lines solely on the basis of race. And putting these two evidentiary items together helps, but it is simply too thin a reed to support the drastic decision to draw lines in this way. We have previously rejected proffers of evidence that were at least as strong as Texas’s here. For example, in Cooper, 581 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11), we analyzed North Carolina’s justification for deliberately moving “African-American voters” into a district to “ensure . . . the district’s racial composition” in the face of its expansion in size. North Carolina argued that its race-based decisions were necessary to comply with §2, but the State could point to “no meaningful legislative inquiry” into “whether a new, enlarged” district, “created without a focus on race, . . . could lead to §2 liability.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 15). North Carolina pointed to two expert reports on “voting patterns throughout the State,” but we rejected that evidence as insufficient. Id., at ___, n. 5 (slip op., at 15, n. 5). Here, Texas has pointed to no actual “legislative inquiry” that would establish the need for its manipulation of the racial makeup of the district. By contrast, where we have accepted a State’s “good reasons” for using race in drawing district lines, the State made a strong showing of a pre-enactment analysis with justifiable conclusions. In Bethune-Hill, the State established that the primary mapdrawer “discussed the district with incumbents from other majority-minority districts[,] . . . considered turnout rates, the results of the recent contested primary and general elections,” and the district’s large prison population. 580 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 15). The State established that it had performed a “functional analysis,” and acted to achieve an “informed bipartisan

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