Alito, J., dissenting
I
A
Gingles marked the Court’s first encounter with the amended version of §2 that Congress enacted in 1982, and the Court’s opinion set out an elaborate framework that has since been used to analyze a variety of §2 claims. Under that framework, a plaintiff must satisfy three “preconditions.” Id., at 50. As summarized in more recent opinions, they are as follows:
“First, [the] ‘minority group’ [whose interest the plaintiff represents] must be ‘sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority’ in some reasonably configured legislative district. Second, the minority group must be ‘politically cohesive.’ And third, a district’s white majority must ‘vote[] sufficiently as a bloc’ to usually ‘defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.’ ” Cooper v. Harris, 581 U. S. 285, 301–302 (2017) (citations omitted).
See also Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Comm’n, 595 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (per curiam) (slip op., at 3); Merrill v. Milligan, 595 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (Kagan, J., dissenting from grant of applications for stays) (slip op., at 3–4).
If a §2 plaintiff can satisfy all these preconditions, the court must then decide whether, based on the totality of the circumstances, the plaintiff’s right to vote was diluted. See Gingles, 478 U. S., at 46–48, 79. And to aid in that inquiry, Gingles approved consideration of a long list of factors set out in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Majority Report on the 1982 VRA amendments. Id., at 44–45 (citing S. Rep. No. 97–417, pp. 28–30 (1982)).
B
My fundamental disagreement with the Court concerns the first Gingles precondition. In cases like these, where
