Polish Americans lean toward Donald Trump despite Ukraine war

DUPONT, Pennsylvania — Despite being in America for several generations, the Poles of Pennsylvania still make Polish liqueurs at Christmas and Polish baskets at Easter. They cook kiełbasa and sauerkraut and even refer to each other by Polish nicknames. 

Among the volunteer board members of the Polish American Citizens Club of Dupont, a borough of 3,000 people, there is no questioning the importance of an identity brought from the old country.

“If somebody came up to me and says: ‘What are you?’ I’d say Polish,” said Martin Kuna, 62, after a board meeting had wrapped up in the cavernous clubhouse basement, beneath the bar. “Even though I’m American, I’d say Polish.”

Little wonder, then, that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is appealing to Polish Americans’ love of their ancestral homeland as she plays for every vote in this crucial swing state ahead of the knife-edge presidential election on Nov. 5.

In her debate against Republican rival Donald Trump in September, she reached out directly to “the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania,” saying Trump would sell out Ukraine to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and that Moscow’s next target would be Poland. Since the Democrats took Pennsylvania by only 80,000 votes in 2020 — Harris’ play to Polish patriotism had a clear-cut electoral logic.

Whether Harris’ gambit works is another matter. The view from Polish Americans POLITICO spoke to in communities across Pennsylvania painted a more complex and nuanced picture. Harris’ invocation of a war 5,000 miles away seemed far from winning the argument against Trump.

Indeed, Trump is also out to secure Polish votes in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, insisting he has a “chemistry” with Poles and fondly remembering a rapturous reception in Warsaw in 2017.

Trump said he hoped he would win a majority among Polish American voters — as he did in 2016 — thanks to his emphasis on Christian values that set him apart from his “Marxist” rival. He styled himself as the conservative candidate who would protect Poland by brokering a peace deal with its traditional arch-enemy: Russia.

America first

At the Polish American Citizens Club in Dupont, it was clear an American identity would prevail over Polish in the electoral crunch, and that the main fixations were the domestic economic and social fault lines shaping the nation at large.

“In all of life, the American flag is the highest,” said John Kuna, 58, Martin’s brother and a fellow board member. He stood up to show off the back of his club T-shirt, printed with the U.S. and Polish flags.

The Pennsylvanian Poles are descended from immigrants who arrived around the turn of the last century to work in mining and manufacturing. But the demise of those industries from the 1950s onward, and subsequent economic hardships, triggered a political shift among blue-collar workers — many of whom had been lifelong Democrats.

Once cohesive Polish communities are now scattered, and generational integration is increasingly diluting any sense of a united Polish American viewpoint. A high percentage of Poles backed Trump in 2016, analysis suggests, but the tide turned against him in 2020.

Fewer than half the Pulaski Club members are Polish Americans now, manager Emil Osif reckons. | Emilio Casalicchio/POLITICO

It also seems Harris’ arguments about the Russian threat to Poland may not prove the knock-out blow she will be hoping for.

“We watch it from afar but you’ve got to remember it’s not in front of our face,” one board member, who chose not to be named, said about the war in Ukraine.

Instead, it’s American life they see in front of their faces. In the wood-paneled bar upstairs, wall-mounted TVs circle the 360-degree countertop, streaming American news shows, American sports and American sitcom reruns. There are neon beer signs advertising American light beers and a board on the wall giving the date of the next “Taco Night.”

Two Dupont Coal Crackers baseball shirts sit in a frame nailed high on one wall. Trophies from local sports teams the club has sponsored sparkle in a corner cabinet. Light washes into the darkened bar from the kitchen, where a giant bag of pancake mix sits on the fridge. 

While the club itself takes no political position, board members said most Poles were more concerned about the economic pain Americans were enduring rather than the war 5,000 miles away in Ukraine — pain most Trump voters blame on Harris and President Joe Biden, not least for pumping cash into a conflict that feels as if it has ground to a stalemate.

“Everybody wants to go to work, make money, come home, enjoy their families. That’s it,” John Kuna said. “And it just seems these past three and a half years have been nothing but turmoil.”

“We’re giving billions of dollars to Ukraine,” he added. “What about our people first?”

Trump’s truce

While the Democrats hoped a visit to Pennsylvania by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy might have boosted their prospects, there were signs even that could have backfired.

During a U.S. tour to shore up support for Ukraine in September, Zelenskyy scrawled grateful messages on U.S. bombs made at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, near Dupont. “Glory to Ukraine,” he wrote on one missile, as Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro smiled in the background, waiting to wield the pen himself. 

“It made a lot of people mad locally, here” said Mark Kowalczyk, a 49-year-old fellow board member of the Polish American Citizens Club. “Because you’re signing bombs that could potentially kill innocent people. On either the Russia or Ukraine side. There’s innocent on both sides.”

Polish Americans have certainly been molded by a history of war. In the towns around Lackawanna County, banners commemorating local soldiers line the streets — dozens of them with Central European names. There’s Michael H. Urbanowicz, who served in World War II, Joseph Guziewicz Sr, who spent time in the U.S. airforce, and a William A. Zielenski, who fought in the Korean War. 

Some Polish Americans argue ending the Ukraine war and associated bloodshed must be the priority. Trump supporters among them say doing a deal, even if it means ceding some Ukrainian land, is the fastest route to stop the fighting.

The Pennsylvanian Poles are descended from immigrants who arrived around the turn of the last century. | Emilio Casalicchio/POLITICO

“There are people at this table who are strong Trump supporters because we want this war to end,” said John Kuna at the club in Dupont, adding that NATO membership would keep Poland safe.

This is a campaign point that Trump repeatedly hammers home, portraying himself as the candidate who could strong-arm freeloading European countries to increase defense spending. “[The war] threatens Poland because, as the expression goes: ‘You’re next.’ And you can’t have that. There would have been no ‘next’ [if I had been president],” Trump told Poland’s right-wing TV Republika channel last week. “No president has done more for the Polish people.”

In the city of Scranton, Prime Bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church Anthony Mikovsky said he understood the dilemma for Poles of wanting to helping their Ukrainian friends battle the Kremlin, while watching food and fuel prices rise at home. 

“They love to say about politics that it’s all local and it’s always the economy,” he said, speaking in his office, his dog collar open and an enormous cross on a gold chain tucked into his shirt pocket. “I can appreciate that, because that’s at your kitchen table. Whereas a lot of other issues are somewhere else.”

Mikovsky raised his palms to the ceiling and rocked them up and down like scales to illustrate the competing weight of priorities on the shoulders of Polonia — the term for Polish descendants of immigrants. “It’s difficult for me to say what wins out there,” he said.

Freedom vs. food prices

For Emil Osif, 63, volunteer manager of the Pulaski Club in a quiet residential corner of Hazle Township, economic pressure predominates in the election battle.

Someone hung a Trump banner outside and Osif sees no reason to move it. He will be voting for the Republican.

The club, around an hour southwest of Scranton, is running at a loss because locals are cautious with their cash. A beer is $2 — far cheaper than in normal bars — but it’s still a struggle to get people through the door when their other bills are so high.

“I consider myself Polish; or Polish American, whatever you want to call it,” said Osif, a fourth generation Pole. “But it really doesn’t mean a lot right now,” his mustache twitched into a smirk, “unless you’re talking to an Irishman.”

It’s little surprise the war in Europe is low on his list of priorities when his ties to Poland are so loose. “I was born here,” he said about the U.S. — noting that the few relatives he still has in Poland are distant. “We have a lot more things to worry about,” he argued. “I’d rather see what’s here improved rather than giving away all our money.” 

Although politics is a banned topic in the Pulaski Club, Osif reckons most Poles he knows would agree with him — although he’s also not sure even half the current membership are Polish descendants any more. Large numbers of Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the town — another reason some locals are deciding to vote for Trump.

“We drink. And gamble,” he said about what ties the Pulaski Club members together, if not being Polish. A glass mosaic lampshade hangs over the pool table; the red Polish eagle on one side contains 100 separate shards alone.

Emil Osif scours for the names of his ancestors in a Pulaski Club logbook from 1934. | Emilio Casalicchio/POLITICO

The club also celebrates the traditional Polish holidays. Osif was preparing the newly renovated function room — paid for via cash from one of the gambling machines in the bar — for Pulaski Day — named after an 18th-century cavalry commander who died in the American war of independence, and celebrated in many Polish American communities.

The club had finished cleaning and arranging two plinths honoring local veterans in time for the occasion, alongside a mortar, a propellor and an anchor from past wars.

Cold War kids

Some older American Poles were more concerned about Ukraine and the threat from Putin, having lived through the Cold War, when Poland was turned into Moscow’s vassal. 

“Putin wants the Soviet Union back, and Poland would be next,” said Jack Kuligowski, 78, also on the board of the Polish American Citizens Club in Dupont. “To me, Putin is the bastard son of Joseph Stalin.” 

He said the Democratic and Republican positions on Ukraine were a motivation to vote against Trump at the coming election.

At the Pulaski Club in Hazle Township, Osif had the original logbook from when his forefathers ran the venue in 1934. He pored over the discolored pages, looking for the names of his ancestors among the notes written in Polish. The tattered book was a relic from not long before both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded Poland. 

It’s difficult to imagine the Polish immigrants of the 1930s and 1940s feeling so nonplussed about an attack on their homeland. But arrivals from those days would have experienced a U.S. economic recovery during and after the war. In solid industries.

Agnes, a first-generation Polish immigrant from Stroudsburg, around an hour south of Dupont, said it was common for older American Poles to be more passionate about defending freedom in Europe. She did not want to give her surname.

She said those who didn’t remember, or know too little, about the past argue each nation should deal with its own problems. It’s a view which echoes the “America First” rhetoric of Trump. She reckoned many American Poles wouldn’t even mind if Putin took a chunk of Poland itself.

“Let him take what he takes and let us go back to normal,” she said, characterizing their train of thought.

Her friend Magdalena — despite also being a first-generation Pole and speaking with a strong Polish accent — exemplified the thinking among the younger generation. She did not want her surname used either.

“I don’t care,” she said of Harris’ warnings over Poland. “I don’t live there anymore. I care about here. People can’t afford groceries.”

Polish American citizens in Dupont admit their U.S. home comes before their Polish roots. | Emilio Casalicchio/POLITICO

Magdalena will vote for Trump for the third time in November, because the higher prices are putting her livelihood at risk. “Of course we should help [the Ukrainians,] but at some point it does affect our economy and it does affect our citizens,” she argued.

Her sister is still in Poland and learning how to shoot a handgun in order to protect herself if the Russians do invade.

Her sister also supports Trump.