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Page Number: 71

26 

ALLEN v. MILLIGAN 

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 alter-
native plan.  Yet that alternative plan need only be “reason-
ably  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 pre-
ferring Democrats and white voters largely preferring Re-
publicans.  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-