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Targeted outreach to ethnic groups—Latino voters, for example—has long been a staple of U.S. presidential campaigns. But it’s been decades since Americans of Central and Eastern European descent figured much in a candidate’s electoral calculus.
That has changed in this campaign, as became evident during the presidential debate in Philadelphia on Sept. 10, when Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris appealed directly to the “800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, she told her opponent, is “a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” Arguing that Poland would be the Kremlin’s next target if Russia wins in Ukraine, Harris said that if Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump were president, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”
Key battleground states that will likely decide the outcome of the November election—including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—have significant populations of Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, Slovak, and Baltic Americans. Before the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, these groups were an important electoral factor, often backing Republican candidates who promised to be tough on Moscow, in whose empire their home countries lay. Politicians of either party ignored these voters at their peril, especially the millions of Polish Americans that made up the largest of the Eastern European voter blocs.
But since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet control over their homelands, these communities have been largely outside the radar of political strategists.
Today, the fate of Central and Eastern Europe is once again at issue amid Russia’s brutal all-out war against Ukraine. Leaders in Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states speak openly about the danger of Russian aggression against their own countries if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine. And so, Americans connected with these countries are suddenly being wooed again.
Take Pennsylvania, one of the most important swing states, with 19 electoral votes and a margin of victory of only 80,550 votes in the 2020 presidential election. Even a small shift among the state’s roughly 800,000 Polish Americans and more than 100,000 Ukrainian Americans could have a decisive effect.
And while few Americans are single-issue voters, among foreign-born and first-generation Eastern European voters, anxiety over the physical safety of their homelands may prove to be a decisive factor in their electoral choices. But even among voters with a less direct connection to the lands of their ancestors, distrust of Russia runs deep. Eastern European communities in the United States have also mobilized to raise millions of dollars to support Ukraine’s war effort and provide humanitarian assistance.
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A line of protesters hold a large flag that stitches together the U.S. and Poland flags in front of them. They also hold small Ukrainian flags on sticks. - Protesters hold a combined Polish and U.S. flag at a pro-Ukraine rally in Reno, Nevada, on Feb. 27, 2022. Ty O’Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Mateusz Morawiecki and Kamala Harris stand side-by-side behind podiums as they shake hands in front of the displayed flags of the U.S. and Poland. - Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki shakes hands with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, on April 11, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The Harris campaign began its outreach to Eastern European voters during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, when a range of national security speakers addressed the Russian threat in Ukraine and beyond. This confluence of circumstances has given Harris the opportunity to strike a tone reminiscent of former President Ronald Reagan and other Cold War-era leaders in her discussion of the Russia-Ukraine war: “As president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies,” she said during her convention speech.
During the September presidential debate, Trump twice refused to give a clear answer regarding whether he wants Ukraine to win its war with Russia. Harris, by contrast, made it clear that she sided with Ukraine and pushed back against Trump’s claim that he would end the war. “The reason that … Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give [Ukraine] up, and that’s not who we are as Americans,” she asserted.
Ulana Mazurkevich, a Ukrainian American living in Pennsylvania and the co-chair of a group called United Ethnic Women for Harris-Walz, believes that Eastern European voters could be significant. “We are making the case to conservative ethnic voters that Trump’s unwillingness to firmly support Ukraine represents a grave threat to their countries of origin,” she told Foreign Policy. “We feel our message can move a few thousand Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian voters in Pennsylvania, and this can prove decisive.”
Such a focused stance on the security of Eastern Europe by a Democratic Party candidate has a precedent. In 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton and his campaign similarly understood the electoral significance of events in Eastern and Central Europe to voters from those regions. The Cold War had just ended, and these diaspora groups would soon turn to mainly domestic concerns. But Clinton also knew that these constituencies wanted their ancestral homelands to transform into prosperous, stable, and secure democracies. For his campaign, I co-authored—with the late Penn Kemble and the support of Richard Schifter—a background paper in which we looked at how Clinton might flip traditionally Republican-leaning Eastern European voters.
During that campaign, we successfully secured the inclusion of a democracy assistance program for East-Central Europe—as well as support for newly independent Ukraine and the Baltic states—in Clinton’s agenda. We also argued that these constituencies would welcome a discussion of early NATO membership for the Central European states, an idea that found sympathy among key Clinton advisors such as Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, and Nancy Soderberg.
Then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton shakes hands with the owner of the Parma Pierogies restaurant during a campaign stop in Ohio in 1992.
While still campaigning, Clinton soon made large-scale financial and technical aid to Poland, Hungary, and what was then still Czechoslovakia a key focus of his foreign policy message. And he criticized the Bush administration for being too slow in grasping the opportunity to stabilize democracy in Central Europe. In speeches at Georgetown University and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Clinton addressed the concerns of Central European, Baltic, and Ukrainian Americans; he also dispatched his foreign policy advisors and surrogates from the U.S. Congress to meet with leaders and voters from these communities. Not surprisingly, Clinton carried Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—three of which Bush had won during the previous election..
Today, the Harris campaign’s focus on Ukraine and Eastern Europe has echoes of 1992. Two Democratic activists—former U.S. Rep. Tom Malinowski (who was born in Poland) and Maryland State Sen. James Rosapepe (with whom I worked during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign)—have established a political action committee named America’s Future Majority Fund. The group runs ads focusing on Russia’s aggression, wrapping its pro-Harris message in Cold War-era realism and mentioning both Reagan and former President John F. Kennedy in an effort to reach centrist and conservative voters.
More recently, Harris campaign ads targeted at Pennsylvania have evoked Polish heroes and focused on the long history of Russian imperialism. The campaign is also supporting a bus tour scheduled for mid-October that will visit Polish and Eastern European communities in the Pennsylvanian towns of Doylestown and Wilkes-Barre. The latter is in Luzerne County, which is the only county in the United States with a plurality of Polish Americans.
Trump supporters approach the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, where Polish President Andrzej Duda attended a mass, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 22. Ryan Collerd/AFP via Getty Images
Trump has tried to make his case to Eastern European voters as well, claiming that the war would “never have happened” under his watch. (Never mind that Russia and Ukraine were fighting each other in eastern Ukraine during the entire Trump presidency.) He also claims that he will quickly end the war if he wins in November. At the same time, Trump has spoken out strongly against further aid to Ukraine, scorned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for allegedly making off with billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars, and accused him of refusing to negotiate peace with Putin.
This demagogy—coupled with his running mate J.D. Vance’s past remarks that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine”—are giving some Eastern European voters pause. Whereas Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have embraced a strong pro-NATO posture, Trump has repeatedly argued against continued support for Ukraine and said he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to delinquent European allies.
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Unlike other, riskier targeted strategies that could alienate swing voters in the political center—a hypothetical move to woo Arab Americans with a more anti-Israel stance, for example—Ukraine has created a clear opening for Harris. Trump’s attacks on Zelensky and calls to stop aiding Ukraine go against the grain of widespread support for Ukraine across both parties’ supporters.
And Trump advisors’ worries that his stance on Russia and Ukraine is unpopular may well have been the reason that Trump—who had initially refused to meet with Zelensky—relented just days after publicly mocking him. In a brief and awkward press conference, Trump refrained from criticizing Zelensky but emphasized his “good relationship” with Putin.
A patron enters a Polish corner store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 23. Ryan Collerd/AFP via Getty Images
I was in Poland in late September and met with several Polish leaders, all of whom expressed worry about Trump’s position on Ukraine and relationship to Putin. Serious voices in Poland are discussing the high likelihood of having to fight a war against Russia. Without question, this sense of urgency is widely shared among recent Polish and Ukrainian immigrants. At a meeting of Eastern European community leaders in New York City on Sept. 21, the vice president of the Polish American Congress, Bozena Kaminska, reflected this worry. “For years, Poland was a secure democracy,” she said. “Since the war in Ukraine, our security is at risk.”
The votes of Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, and Baltic Americans have returned to the forefront of electoral strategies in a handful of swing states. With the stakes so high and the races so close, small shifts among these culturally conservative constituencies could well provide the crucial margin of victory on Nov. 5. Given their track record on Russia and Ukraine, there is little that Trump and Vance can do to turn the tide in their favor; they will have to hope that Eastern Europeans’ voting decisions will be driven by other concerns.
Harris, in contrast, is betting on a combination of targeted outreach and continued missteps by her opponents on Russian aggression. Once again, a crucial immigrant community could help bring about a presidential victory.