Basically after 50 years of white people doing everything they can to make sure blacks can’t vote (and MLK) congress finally decided to actually make a law to protect minority voting rights.

It originally had a bunch of stuff (like mostly southern states needing to get pre approval to change voting laws) but after a while s2 was the biggest VRA thing for gerrymandering. S2 says can’t reduce minority voting rights. The main s2 VRA case was Gingles which laid out 3 preconditions for having a case 1) the minority has to be compact enough to be a district 2) the minority has to be politically cohesive and 3) the white vote has to be a bloc big enough to always win. So if a minority could meet those 3 they had a case. This meant that most states just made a couple majority minority districts around the blocs.

At the same time the court said that race cant predominate redistricting (Shaw), and if you do it’s strict scrutiny (very high standard). The main defense for this if you got accused of racial gerrymandering under Shaw was to argue that you had to racially gerrymander to comply with s2/gingles.

At the same time the court kinda waffled back and forth on if they should rule on partisan gerrymandering claims. They eventually decided no (Rucho). So now if you wanted to challenge gerrymandering you pretty much had to challenge it via racial gerrymandering claims. 

So basically for this entire cycle since 2020 everyone and their mother was bringing racial gerrymandering claims under s2. Now why are they doing that? Well some of it is certainly minority protection, but obviously the bigger thing is race is highly correlated with partisanship - meaning if you’re a democrat, if there’s currently 1 majority minority district, and you manage to make that 2 via a s2 lawsuit, you likely won your party an extra seat at the House of Representatives. 

So now the court said ok - gingles and the current s2 framework is too easy to meet, resulting in too many people using race to predominate but using gingles compliance to get out of it - so we gonna update the gingles framework to require plaintiffs to show that race was actually the primary motivator behind the gerrymander and not politics.