A frequent refrain for the past eight or so years is that Trump’s fealty to Putin has to come at a cost with certain U.S. voters – we have plenty of communities descended from people who emigrated from Eastern Europe, and no group so numerous as Polish-American voters. Czech, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian-Americans also bear mentioning in this context, but there are other, smaller communities from countries with historically rough relations with Russia and its predecessor states. Polish-Americans, however, take the cake and are worth highlighting.
To wit: about eight percent of the populations of Michigan and Wisconsin claim Polish ancestry. Nearly six percent of Pennsylvanians do as well. At least according to our online encyclopedia of choice (congratulate me for my exhaustive research in the comments).
The big question is how susceptible this group is to appeals about the safety of their ancestral homeland. While one of my ancestors is from there, I can’t claim any ties to the community or membership in any Polish-American organizations. I can think of any number of proud Irish-Americans – and their ancestors, almost certainly emigrated decades earlier.
There is precedent here. In the late 1940s, the Republican Party saw an opportunity to drive a wedge into the Democratic New Deal coalition by claiming that Poland and its neighbors had been betrayed at Yalta. While this, by itself, didn’t bring the Eisenhower landslide of 1952, Americans of Eastern European extraction would henceforth be especially staunch anti-communists.
At this point, Poland receives the occasional threat from Putin and his acolytes. The election of Donald Tusk has bolstered Warsaw’s support for Kyiv and Tusk is likely to play an especially prominent role in European politics, with Macron term-limited and Scholz troubled by low approval ratings. One can make a credible case that Poland’s safety is at stake. Putin fetishizes an empire that once ruled much of Poland, and which cracked down brutally when Poles rebelled.
This exists more to pose a question than to offer an answer – the question is whether a reverse Yalta play is feasible. Can Polish-American voters still be rallied on an appeal to protect the homeland? Perhaps it helps to do so on behalf of a Catholic president and against a Russophile demagogue. A successful appeal could move the needle across the Northern swing states, compensating for other difficulties in Michigan. And, again, what goes for Polish-Americans could go for others.