Alaska and Hawaii 1960

[Agonized-Statism]

Most people expected Hawaii to be the Republican state and Alaska to be the Democrat state at the time, and that was reasonable given that they only started shifting around the mid-1950s. Their politics were in flux at the time, and Kennedy being a New Englander probably helped him in New Englander-colonized Hawaii while Nixon's fifty-state strategy may have made a difference in Alaska. Once it was clear that Alaska wouldn't become a welfare state out of an inability raise enough taxes due to its small population, and Democrats staked a claim on civil rights to the benefit of majority-minority Hawaii, the two settled into their current state and neither party has really bothered to try flipping them for so few electoral votes.