Thomas, J., dissenting
up the lost population, District 1 would have to extend eastward through largely majority-white rural counties along the length of Alabama’s border with the Florida panhandle. The plaintiffs do not assert that white residents on the Gulf Coast have anything special in common with white residents in those communities, and the District Court made no such finding. The plaintiffs’ maps would thus reduce District 1 to the leftover white communities of the southern fringe of the State, its shape and constituents defined almost entirely by the need to make District 2 majority-black while also retaining a majority-black District 7.
The plaintiffs’ mapmaking experts left little doubt that their plans prioritized race over neutral districting criteria. Dr. Moon Duchin, who devised four of the plans, testified that achieving “two majority-black districts” was a “nonnegotiable principl[e]” in her eyes, a status shared only by our precedents’ “population balance” requirement. 2 App. 634; see also id., at 665, 678. Only “after” those two “nonnegotiable[s]” were satisfied did Dr. Duchin then give lower priority to “contiguity” and “compactness.” Id., at 634. The architect of the other seven maps, William Cooper, considered “minority voting strengt[h]” a “traditional redistricting principl[e]” in its own right, id., at 591, and treated “the minority population in and of itself” as the paramount community of interest in his plans, id., at 601.
Statistical evidence also underscored the illustrative maps’ extreme racial sorting. Another of the plaintiffs’ experts, Dr. Kosuke Imai, computer generated 10,000 districting plans using a race-blind algorithm programmed to observe several objective districting criteria. Supp. App. 58–59. None of those plans contained even one majority-black district. Id., at 61. Dr. Imai generated another 20,000 plans using the same algorithm, but with the additional constraint that they must contain at least one majority-black district; none of those plans contained a second majority-black district, or even a second district with a
