1012
Opinion of the Court
litical processes. Id., at 46, 79-80; id., at 98-99 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment). To be sure, some § 2 plaintiffs may have easy cases, but although lack of equal electoral opportunity may be readily imagined and unsurprising when demonstrated under circumstances that include the three essential Gingles factors, that conclusion must still be addressed explicitly, and without isolating any other arguably relevant facts from the act of judgment.10
2
If the three Gingles factors may not be isolated as sufficient, standing alone, to prove dilution in every multimember district challenge, a fortiori they must not be when the challenge goes to a series of single-member districts, where dilution may be more difficult to grasp. Plaintiffs challenging single-member districts may claim, not total submergence, but partial submergence; not the chance for some electoral
10 If challenges to multimember districts are likely to be the easier plaintiffs' cases, it is worth remembering that even in multimember district challenges, proof of the Gingles factors has not always portended liability under § 2. In Baird v. Consolidated City of Indianapolis, 976 F. 2d 357 (1992), the Seventh Circuit confronted a scheme for electing a City-County Council of 29 members. Voters chose 25 of their representatives from single-member districts and 4 at large, from a district representing the entire area. Black plaintiffs brought a vote dilution claim challenging the lines for single-member districts and the existence of the four-member at-large district. After the Council had redrawn its single-member districts to rectify dilution there, the District Court held, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed, that the four-member district did not dilute black voting strength because proof of the three Gingles factors was not enough "if other considerations show that the minority has an undiminished right to participate in the political process." 976 F. 2d, at 359. The "other considerations" in Baird included the fact that the new single-member districts were so drawn that blacks formed a voting majority in seven of them (28 percent of the single-member districts and 24 percent of the entire council) while blacks constituted 21 percent of the local population; and that while the four at-large seats tended to go to Republicans, one of the Republicans elected in 1991 was black. Id., at 358, 361.
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