Christine Baranski, star of stage and screen, was watching the presidential debate in September when a lightbulb went off.
Vice President Kamala Harris made a pointed reference to “the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania” as she castigated former President Donald Trump for his warm relationship with Vladimir Putin. Baranski, an actress who is among the country’s more famous Polish Americans, wondered if she could help sway any of them to Harris.
This is how Baranski, a Buffalo native who plays a socialite in “The Gilded Age,” found herself on a modest street corner in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., last week, knocking on doors and talking to me.
“I just thought, ‘Well, if there’s a way of making Polish Americans feel that heroic thing that they have,’” Baranski said, after stepping off a doorstep decorated for Halloween. “This election is so important that actually they could make a difference.”
As Election Day nears, Polish American voters — as well as other Eastern European ethnic groups — have become as hot a commodity, electorally speaking, as kielbasa at Christmastime.
In a dead-heat race, both Trump and Harris have made direct appeals to the group, which happens to be well-represented in the so-called Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While Polish Americans are often seen as fairly conservative because of their Catholic roots, Democrats are hoping to gain the support of those who are concerned about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and apprehensive about Trump’s ties to the Russian president. Harris’s campaign is working to reach to those voters on the ground, while her allies say they have spent more than $1 million on digital advertisements micro-targeted at Polish and Ukrainian Americans in Pennsylvania.
Five percent of Pennsylvanians have Polish ancestry, and they are concentrated most densely in parts of northeastern Pennsylvania like Luzerne County, where Polish immigrants were drawn to jobs in coal mines and steel mills in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.
And that is where I met Baranski, who had joined a group of Polish and Ukrainian American volunteers for a bus tour last week for canvassing, a visit to a Catholic shrine that is a landmark for Polish Americans, and a rally in a hotel ballroom in downtown Wilkes-Barre.
“Let’s get out and vote,” the chair of the local Democratic Party, Thomas Shubilla, told the crowd. “We’re calling it Poles to the polls!”
A ‘Polish American’ reason to vote
The last time Polish American voters figured so prominently into an American presidential election was probably 1976, when President Gerald Ford said on the debate stage that he did not think “the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” The comment made Ford appear deeply naïve about the Iron Curtain — and angered voters with Eastern European heritage.
This year, both campaigns are making a point to win them over. Trump had planned to visit the shrine with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, although that visit was canceled. Trump sat for an interview this month with a right-wing Polish television station.
“There’s nobody who has ever done more for the Polish people than I have,” Trump said — a point on which President Ronald Reagan, who lifted sanctions on Poland and is memorialized in Warsaw with a statue, might have disagreed.
Democrats spotted an opportunity to reach out to Polish American voters, too. A super PAC, America’s Future Majority Fund, has put about $1.2 million behind three videos and other digital ads intended to appeal specifically to Polish and Ukrainian voters in Pennsylvania by evoking both nations’ history and the alliance between those nations and the United States.
“There’s never been, at least in my memory, a Polish American or Ukrainian American reason to vote for either the Democrats or Republicans, because presidents of both parties have been equally strong for NATO, for Poland against Russian aggression,” said former Representative Tom Malinowski, a Polish-born Democrat who scripted the three video ads.
“This year,” he said, “there is.”
Concerns about immigration and inflation
The Democrats’ task may not be easy. Polish American voters may tend to be socially conservative, and they don’t necessarily vote through the lens of their ethnic identity.
When I stopped into Mom & Pop’s Pierogie in Wilkes-Barre, the owner, Greg Bobeck, a Rebublican, told me he had supported Trump in 2016 and 2020 and planned to do so again. He has Polish ancestry, he said, but his concerns about the border and inflation — which has taken a bite out of his business — loomed larger than the war in Ukraine.
“Business slowed down in here,” he said, explaining that people aren’t buying as many specialty items like the pierogies he sells. “You don’t really need this, you know?” (I said that I personally think pierogies are very important.)
Bobeck also said he thought Trump’s close relationship with Putin might actually help bring a faster end to the war — an idea that Trump’s critics fiercely contest.
Still, Polish American Democrats in Wilkes-Barre are working to turn out every Harris voter they can. When Baranski knocked on Dennis and Anne Bozinski’s door with State Representative Eddie Day Pashinski, a Democrat, Pashinski said hello in Polish. Bozinski seemed a bit confused and did not seem to recognize Baranski — but he was delighted to see Pashinski, who moonlights as a musician and who had once taught him in music class.
Both Bozinskis said they planned to vote for Harris.
Malinowski said Democrats wouldn’t need to win over every Polish American voter. In a tight election, he is hoping that just enough of them will choose Harris over Trump, who was opposed to the most recent package of military aid to Ukraine and has suggested he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO members who do not contribute enough to mutual defense.
“If this is a close election, as close as people expect it to be, a shift in even a few thousand voters who might, under normal circumstances, vote Republican for social and cultural reasons, could decide the fate of the country,” he said.
The crowded scene at a Blue Wall bus stop in Pennsylvania
The Harris campaign has been enlisting every surrogate it can find in the effort to win the battleground state of Pennsylvania. My colleague Jonathan Weisman was there recently and shared the experience of one of those Harris supporters, who found himself upstaged.
Conor Lamb, a former congressman from Western Pennsylvania and a once-rising Democratic star, said he had been invited by local Democrats to Armstrong Park in a Pittsburgh suburb as a headliner of sorts to start their canvass on Saturday afternoon.
Then, indignities upon indignities, he was upstaged, big time. The popular governor of the state, Josh Shapiro, would be dropping by in a big blue bus with a few of his friends. Those friends included Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin and, somewhat incongruously, Gov. Janet Mills of Maine — which is not part of the vaunted Blue Wall of states that Kamala Harris needs to win the presidency, and not even a swing state.
A decorated Marine Corps veteran and a moderate, Lamb vaulted to political prominence in early 2018 by winning a special election in a district won by Trump and foreshadowing the Democratic wave to come. But his star faded in 2022 after he lost the Democratic primary for an open Senate seat to Pennsylvania’s brasher lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, and on Saturday, he was more preoccupied with corralling his young son than with greeting Shapiro and his pals.
The stop at a small canvass kickoff was a sign, he said, that party bigwigs were running out of places to appear.
He also openly dismissed the notion, pushed by some Democrats in Pennsylvania, that having put Shapiro on the ticket would long ago have sewed up the state for Harris, given the governor’s easy victory in 2022 over his oh-so-Trumpy Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano.
“No offense to Josh,” Lamb said, “but he was running against the worst candidate of the cycle” in 2022. “It’s this close because the voters are entrenched,” he added.
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