Politico published a critical piece last week about how “Kamala Harris is warning Polish Americans not to vote for Donald Trump. Many will.” They comprise 5.69%, 7.61%, and 8% of the population in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin so they can make or break the election. Kamala has tried winning them over to her side by fearmongering that Trump will sell out Ukraine and then let Putin attack Poland next, but most Polish Americans care more about socio-economic issues than foreign ones.
She’s therefore making a mistake by pandering to what her campaign wrongly expects Poles to care about, namely helping Ukraine and containing Russia, when even Poland at the state and civil society levels is no longer as gung-ho about those goals as before. Regarding the first, its Defense Minister admitted in late August that his country maxed out its military support for Ukraine, while its Foreign Minister suggested last month that the state should cut benefits for conscription-aged Ukrainian males.
As for the second, a recent survey from a publicly funded research center revealed that two-thirds of Poles demanded that conscription-aged Ukrainian males be deported to fight and only less than half supported continuing the conflict. Nevertheless, Kamala expects Polish Americans – many of whom are already several generations removed from Poland, don’t speak Polish, and never even visited there – to “be more Polish than native-born Poles and the Polish government” when it comes to this proxy war.
That’s another mistake because most don’t self-identify with their ethno-national group as strongly as African Americans do so they’re much less influenced by appeals to their group’s perceived interests. Even those that do identify in that way don’t usually care more about foreign affairs than socio-economic ones, and among the miniscule minority that does, they’re informed of their ancestral homeland’s evolving approach towards this issue, which differs from how Kamala has presented it as proven above.
Moreover, this miniscule minority knows that outgoing conservative-nationalist President Andrzej Duda favors Trump with whom he’s formed a closed friendship while incumbent liberal-globalist Prime Minister Donald Tusk detests him, so “ancestral loyalty” in this election also has a partisan dimension. By condescendingly treating Polish Americans as a homogenous blob of easily manipulatable Russophobes, however, Kamala is ignoring the real issues that’ll determine who they’ll vote for.
Those of them who she’s trying to court from those three swing states reside in the Rust Belt, which naturally predisposes them to prioritize socio-economic issues over foreign ones much more than average voters do because of how deeply they’ve been affected by them. Even Politico’s piece mentions how some Polish Americans are complaining about all the money that the US already gave to Ukraine so Kamala’s fearmongering about Trump cutting it off might actually win them over to his side.
They’d prefer for this money to remain inside the US and reinvested into improving the lives of fellow Rust Belt residents regardless of their partisan disposition or ethno-national identity. Considering how important of an issue this is to them, many naturally support Trump over Kamala since the latter shares responsibility with Biden for the downturn in their living conditions over the past four years, hence why her campaign is desperately trying to distract them with counterproductive foreign policy pandering.
