How ‘Gilded Age’ Star Christine Baranski Is Helping Harris Sway Polish American Voters

Christine Baranski, star of stage and screen, was watching the presidential debate in September when a lightbulb went off.

Vice President Kamala Harris made a pointed reference to “the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania” as she castigated former President Donald Trump for his warm relationship with Vladimir Putin. Baranski, an actress who is among the country’s more famous Polish Americans, wondered if she could help sway any of them to Harris.

This is how Baranski, a Buffalo native who plays a socialite in “The Gilded Age,” found herself on a modest street corner in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., last week, knocking on doors and talking to me.

“I just thought, ‘Well, if there’s a way of making Polish Americans feel that heroic thing that they have,’” Baranski said, after stepping off a doorstep decorated for Halloween. “This election is so important that actually they could make a difference.”

As Election Day nears, Polish American voters — as well as other Eastern European ethnic groups — have become as hot a commodity, electorally speaking, as kielbasa at Christmastime.

In a dead-heat race, both Trump and Harris have made direct appeals to the group, which happens to be well-represented in the so-called Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While Polish Americans are often seen as fairly conservative because of their Catholic roots, Democrats are hoping to gain the support of those who are concerned about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and apprehensive about Trump’s ties to the Russian president. Harris’s campaign is working to reach to those voters on the ground, while her allies say they have spent more than $1 million on digital advertisements micro-targeted at Polish and Ukrainian Americans in Pennsylvania.