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Opinion of the Court
ance in the State's congressional delegation." Cromartie v. Hunt, 133 F. Supp. 2d 407, 413 (EDNC 2000). It added that to "achieve the second goal," the legislature "drew the new plan (1) to avoid placing two incumbents in the same district and (2) to preserve the partisan core of the existing districts." Ibid. The court concluded that the "plan as enacted largely reflects these directives." Ibid. But the court also found "as a matter of fact that the General Assembly . . . used criteria . . . that are facially race driven" without any compelling justification for doing so. Id., at 420.
The court based its latter, constitutionally critical, conclusion in part upon the district's snakelike shape, the way in which it split cities and towns, and its heavily African-American (47%) voting population, id., at 413-415—all matters that this Court had considered when it found summary judgment inappropriate, Cromartie, 526 U. S., at 544. The court also based this conclusion upon a specific finding—absent when we previously considered this litigation—that the legislature had drawn the boundaries in order "to collect precincts with high racial identification rather than political identification." 133 F. Supp. 2d, at 420 (emphasis added).
This last-mentioned finding rested in turn upon five subsidiary determinations:
(1) that "the legislators excluded many heavily-Democratic precincts from District 12, even when those precincts immediately border the Twelfth and would have established a far more compact district," id., at 419; see also id., at 421 ("more heavily Democratic precincts . . . were bypassed . . . in favor of precincts with a higher African-American population"); (2) that "[a]dditionally, Plaintiffs' expert, Dr. Weber, showed time and again how race trumped party affiliation in the construction of the 12th District and how political explanations utterly failed to explain the composition of the district," id., at 419;
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