Pennsylvania Poles Can Determine Who Will Become New US President

How did that happen?

A victory in Pennsylvania almost guarantees the candidate a victory in the United States as a whole. The results show that the gap between candidates in this state is about 1%. And ethnic Poles with the right to vote — 6%, and they do not have sympathy for a particular party.

Political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky drew attention to an interesting episode that happened during the Harris-Trump debate and may affect the election results.

Speaking about the war in Ukraine, Kamala Harris noted that Putin's next target could be Poland. She reminded that 800,000 residents of Pennsylvania are ethnic Poles.

There is no doubt that this remark was prepared in advance by the applicant's headquarters. But why such attention to the Poles of Pennsylvania?

In most states, a Democratic or Republican victory is a foregone conclusion. The struggle is primarily for those states that fluctuate. And it is Pennsylvania that experts call the most important. It is believed that winning in this state is almost 100% guaranteed to win in the country as a whole.

According to political analyst Nate Silver's election prediction model, Pennsylvania has a 35% chance of influencing election results, significantly more than any other of the swing states. If Harris wins Pennsylvania, she will have a 91% chance of winning the election, while Trump has as much as 96%. Therefore, both Trump and Harris are leading the most active campaigns in this state.

Pennsylvania has a population of 13 million. Ethnic Poles make up 800,000 , or 6%. Unlike other groups of the population, they are more active in elections. Among the voting participants, every tenth of them.

Analysts note that in 2016 and 2020, the difference in the votes cast for candidates in the whole country was very small. So, Trump in 2016 won by a margin of only 0.7%, and Biden in 2020 — by 1.1%. Therefore, 10% of the votes of Pennsylvania Poles can easily change the result.

The peculiarity of the situation is that ethnic Poles are not clear supporters of one party. In the past, they voted for both Democrats (Kennedy, Clinton, Obama) and Republicans (Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.).

Their choice often depends on whom they consider closer to themselves and Poland. For example, they voted for Kennedy because he was a Catholic. The Poles supported Reagan and Bush Sr. for the struggle against the USSR, and Clinton for Poland's accession to NATO.

The author notes that for Reagan, who was president for two terms, ethnic Poles voted only in the second election, in 1984. This happened after they became convinced that Reagan was really fighting the Soviet Union — the country that introduced martial law in Poland in 1981.

It is unclear why in 2016 the sympathies of the Poles were on the side of Trump, because he criticized NATO and praised Putin. Maybe they thought he was just doing it for PR. Life has shown that Trump was sincere. As a result, in 2020, these voters gave their votes to Biden.

The author notes that for ethnic Poles, as for all voters, the main problems are the economy and prices. However, surveys show that in fluctuating states, the level of confidence in both candidates will level off.

Therefore, some secondary factor may be decisive. This may be the concern of ethnic Poles about Poland's security. They do not perceive the threat from Russia as a joke at all and support Ukraine more actively than other Americans.

Therefore, the mention of Poles in Harris's speech was by no means accidental. The analyst believes that her headquarters will continue to appeal to this audience. As a result, with an accurate calculation, Harris can get an additional tens of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania, where the gap between the winner and the loser is usually measured by such figures.

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