Opinion of the Court
two witnesses testified that the Gulf Coast was a community of interest. Id., at 1015. The testimony provided by one of those witnesses was “partial, selectively informed, and poorly supported.” Ibid. The other witness, meanwhile, justified keeping the Gulf Coast together “simply” to preserve “political advantage[]”: “You start splitting counties,” he testified, “and that county loses its influence. That’s why I don’t want Mobile County to be split.” Id., at 990, 1015. The District Court understandably found this testimony insufficient to sustain Alabama’s “overdrawn argument that there can be no legitimate reason to split” the Gulf Coast region. Id., at 1015.
Even if the Gulf Coast did constitute a community of interest, moreover, the District Court found that plaintiffs’ maps would still be reasonably configured because they joined together a different community of interest called the Black Belt. Id., at 1012–1014. Named for its fertile soil, the Black Belt contains a high proportion of black voters, who “share a rural geography, concentrated poverty, unequal access to government services, … lack of adequate healthcare,” and a lineal connection to “the many enslaved people brought there to work in the antebellum period.” Id., at 1012–1013; see also 1 App. 299–304. The District Court concluded—correctly, under our precedent—that it did not have to conduct a “beauty contest[]” between plaintiffs’ maps and the State’s. There would be a split community of interest in both. 582 F. Supp. 3d, at 1012 (quoting Bush v. Vera, 517 U. S. 952, 977–978 (1996) (plurality opinion)).
The State also makes a related argument based on “core retention”—a term that refers to the proportion of districts that remain when a State transitions from one districting plan to another. See, e.g., Brief for Alabama 25, 61. Here, by largely mirroring Alabama’s 2011 districting plan, HB1 performs well on the core retention metric. Plaintiffs’ illustrative plans, by contrast, naturally fare worse because they change where the 2011 district lines were drawn. See
