In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will carry the story through 2024.
In an election likely to be decided by a razor-thin margin, across a landscape that consists of a small group of battleground states, both campaigns are leaving no rock unturned in the hunt for every vote.
The recent fixation on the Polish American vote is a prime example. As she made her case for the defense of Ukraine in the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Kamala Harris made an explicit nod to “the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania” who should be worried about the threat to Poland and Europe posed by Trump’s opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Trump’s campaign responded a week later by scheduling a visit to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a Polish-American Catholic holy place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where Trump is expected to meet Sunday with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
There’s just one problem: The Polish American voting bloc both campaigns are targeting is a mirage. It’s a phantom battleground constituency that doesn’t really exist anymore.
Many Polish Americans continue to have an affinity for the old country, and take great pride in their heritage. Poland’s rich cultural traditions continue to be venerated in America. Polish fraternal organizations and other cultural institutions are still going strong. They’re just no longer a discrete voting group that is likely to be responsive to election appeals.
It’s a familiar American story.
More than a century of assimilation, intermarriage, economic success and the fraying of ties with the ancestral homeland over time have made the idea of a cohesive bloc of Polish American votes as outmoded as the idea that there is a cohesive bloc of votes from the other big white ethnic groups — English, German, Irish and Italian. Even in Chicago, once said to contain more Poles than any city outside Warsaw, the Polish American vote isn’t what it used to be.
