In party politics, the two territories were balanced, it being widely assumed that Hawai‘i would be a Republican state and Alaska a Democratic one (exactly wrong, it turned out). But their admission would quite obviously unbalance national politics on another axis. Whatever the party allegiances of these new states, their racial composition would put them firmly in the civil rights camp. Southern Democrats in the Senate, nervous about what these states would do to Jim Crow, threatened to filibuster.
