Thomas, J., dissenting
that “an express racial target” is not highly probative evidence of racial predominance. 580 U. S., at 192 (placing “express racial target[s]” alongside “stark splits in the racial composition of [redistricted] populations” as “relevant districtwide evidence”). That the Bethune-Hill majority “decline[d]” to act as a “ ‘court of … first view,’ ” instead leaving the ultimate issue of predominance for remand, cannot be transmuted into such an implausible holding or, in truth, any holding at all. Id., at 193.
The plurality is also mistaken that my predominance analysis would doom every illustrative map a §2 plaintiff “ever adduced.” Ante, at 25 (emphasis deleted). Rather, it would mean only that—because §2 requires a race-neutral benchmark—plaintiffs cannot satisfy their threshold burden of showing a reasonably configured alternative plan with a proposal that could only be viewed as a racial gerrymander if enacted by the State. This rule would not bar a showing, in an appropriate case, that a State could create an additional majority-minority district through a reasonable redistricting process in which race did not predominate. It would, on the other hand, screen out efforts to use §2 to push racially proportional districting to the limits of what a State’s geography and demography make possible—the approach taken by the illustrative maps here.
C
The foregoing analysis should be enough to resolve these cases: If the plaintiffs have not shown that Alabama could create two majority-black districts without resorting to a racial gerrymander, they cannot have shown that Alabama’s one-majority-black-district map “dilutes” black Alabamians’ voting strength relative to any meaningfully race-neutral benchmark. The inverse, however, is not true: Even if it were possible to regard the illustrative maps as not requiring racial predominance, it would not necessarily follow that a two-majority-black-district map was an appropriate
