Cite as: 588 U. S. ____ (2019) 27 Opinion of the Court easier for supporters of Republican candidates to translate their votes into seats,” thereby “enhanc[ing] the[ir] relative voice.” Id., at 933 (internal quotation marks omitted). These cases involve blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions. But the First Amendment analysis below offers no “clear” and “manageable” way of distinguishing permissible from impermissible partisan motivation. The Common Cause court embraced that conclusion, observing that “a judicially manageable framework for evaluating partisan gerrymandering claims need not distinguish an ‘acceptable’ level of partisan gerrymandering from ‘excessive’ partisan gerrymandering” because “the Constitution does not authorize state redistricting bodies to engage in such partisan gerrymandering.” Id., at 851. The decisions below prove the prediction of the Vieth plurality that “a First Amendment claim, if it were sustained, would render unlawful all consideration of political affiliation in districting,” 541 U. S., at 294, contrary to our established precedent. C The dissent proposes using a State’s own districting criteria as a neutral baseline from which to measure how extreme a partisan gerrymander is. The dissent would have us line up all the possible maps drawn using those criteria according to the partisan distribution they would produce. Distance from the “median” map would indicate whether a particular districting plan harms supporters of one party to an unconstitutional extent. Post, at 18–19, 25 (opinion of KAGAN, J.). As an initial matter, it does not make sense to use criteria that will vary from State to State and year to year as the baseline for determining whether a gerrymander violates the Federal Constitution. The degree of partisan advantage that the Constitution tolerates should not turn on criteria offered by the gerrymanderers themselves. It