Update, I did find that one state did appear in the joined table, the other still appear as Null
There was a warning (yellow ! mark). What did it say?
Click the Validate Join button and check the message. See also the Add Join help for examples.
It is unlikely to be the problem but text in text fields can have invisible trailing (and leading) blank spaces. I have found this to be a problem on more than one occasion, even from "reliable" data sources. The following text string images look to be the same but the lower one has a trailing blank, which can be seen by clicking the mouse at the end of the text string. ArcGIS Pro sees them as different and no match will be made.