Thomas, J., dissenting
must be “a hypothetical, undiluted plan,” Bossier Parish School Bd., 520 U. S., at 480, and the first precondition at least requires plaintiffs to identify some hypothetical alternative plan. Yet that alternative plan need only be “reasonably configured,” and—as explained above—to say that a plan is reasonable is a far cry from establishing an objective standard of fairness.
That leaves only the Gingles framework’s final stage: the totality-of-circumstances determination whether a State’s “political process is equally open to minority voters.” 478 U. S., at 79. But this formulation is mere verbiage unless one knows what an “equally open” system should look like—in other words, what the benchmark is. And, our cases offer no substantive guidance on how to identify the undiluted benchmark at the totality stage. The best they have to offer is a grab bag of amorphous “factors”—widely known as the Senate factors, after the Senate Judiciary Committee Report accompanying the 1982 amendments to §2—that Gingles said “typically may be relevant to a §2 claim.” See id., at 44–45. Those factors, however, amount to no more than “a list of possible considerations that might be consulted by a court attempting to develop a gestalt view of the political and racial climate in a jurisdiction.” Holder, 512 U. S., at 938 (opinion of Thomas, J.). Such a gestalt view is far removed from the necessary benchmark of a hypothetical, undiluted districting plan.
To see this, one need only consider the District Court’s use of the Senate factors here. See 582 F. Supp. 3d, at 1018–1024. The court began its totality-stage analysis by reiterating what nobody disputes: that voting in Alabama is racially polarized, with black voters overwhelmingly preferring Democrats and white voters largely preferring Republicans. To rebut the State’s argument that this pattern is attributable to politics, not race per se, the court noted that Donald Trump (who is white) prevailed over Ben Car-
