Can Harris sway Pennsylvania’s Ukrainian vote ahead of a tight presidential race?

October 30, 2024

By Ukraine

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JENKINTOWN, Pennsylvania — Ukrainian American Sophika Lashchyk-Tytla says she can’t understand why her brother plans to vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump given his open hostility to continuing U.S. support for Ukraine.

Hours after unconvincing arguments with her brother, the Philadelphia native carried a kit of campaign information as she canvassed in the city’s suburbs with fellow Ukrainians who’ve rallied around Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Just ten days before the election, nearly a dozen went door-knocking in Montgomery County, where one of the country’s largest Ukrainian populations now has voter material available in Ukrainian for the first time. The county includes non-voting recent emigres from President Joe Biden’s post-full-scale invasion Uniting for Ukraine parole program and thousands more with U.S. citizenship who arrived in the 1990s.

The door-to-door canvassing in the campaign's final days unfolded amid immense stakes for Ukraine’s more than two-and-a-half-year fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion. Pennsylvania is the swing state all paths to the White House seem to run through for both candidates.

“I feel like I’m trying to save Ukraine and our country and I can’t listen to your (Trump) stuff,” Lashchyk-Tytla told her brother as she departed for a weekend of rallying Ukrainian support for Harris.

“I don’t think he’s thinking (about) Ukraine, the Ukrainians that are voting for (Trump) have been listening to his double-speak, and more recently, he’s been really clear that he’s not supportive of Ukraine, so how can you say that ‘Trump is going to help Ukraine’ and say he is the only one who keeps (Russia) on their toes?”

In the final days of the campaign, Vice President Harris’s team knows securing Montgomery County could lead to capturing the entire state demands support from Pennsylvania’s large Eastern European population. Their numbers exceed the crucial margin of victory, with Biden winning by nearly 81,000 votes in the state in 2020 to prevent Trump’s re-election to a second term.

The Harris campaign hopes that by going to traditionally conservative Ukrainian communities in Pennsylvania and reminding them of Trump’s adversarial position to supporting Ukraine in its defense of Russia’s full-scale war, the state’s Polish and Lithuanian populations will also show up for Harris alongside their Ukrainian neighbors.

Andrew Lashchyk, Spohika’s 57-year-old brother, says he’s sent thousands of dollars to support Ukraine. He simultaneously wants a better U.S. economy and for Ukraine to not cede any of its land to Russia, which is why he’ll vote for Trump. The war will end sooner under a Trump administration, he says.

“In terms of what Trump will do for Ukraine, it’s kind of up in the air, I don't believe he will necessarily provide weapons and help so to speak, but what he will do is pressure (Russian President Vladimir Putin),” Lashchyk told the Kyiv Independent.

“I believe that Trump will negotiate some kind of end to the war, do I believe Ukraine will have to cede some of our ground in order for the killing to stop, probably, I’m totally not okay with that but I have no choice.”

For Lashchyk, who considers himself extremely patriotic for Ukraine and America, Harris hasn’t offered enough commitment to Ukraine in her campaign. “If (Harris) somehow was able to guarantee me another $30 billion that would be sent (to Ukraine) the day she won office, okay I might give up my American country for Ukraine.”

Russia’s war in Ukraine is one of the candidates’ most vividly contentious issues of the Nov. 5 election, with their respective positions in near complete opposition to each other.

“Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda will not only raise costs for Ukrainian-American families and strip them of their fundamental freedoms, it will also put the people of Ukraine in grave danger as he sidles up to Putin, threatens to cut off support for Ukraine, and abandons our allies,” Filip Jotevski, the Harris campaign’s national director of diaspora and ethnic engagement, wrote in a statement to the Kyiv Independent.

"Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda will not only raise costs for Ukrainian-American families and strip them of their fundamental freedoms, it will also put the people of Ukraine in grave danger as he sidles up to Putin, threatens to cut off support for Ukraine, and abandons our allies."

After appearing alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September, Harris offered a glimpse into her stance on her support for Ukraine, saying in an October interview that Ukraine’s hope to join NATO is a question for the future but that she would not meet with Putin for peace talks without Ukraine’s presence.

In a highly anticipated Oct. 29 speech on the National Mall in the shadow of the White House, she added that Putin and North Korea are cheering for Trump to win.

Trump, who has a history of cozying up to Putin, has pledged — with minimal detail — to swiftly end the war and even blamed Zelensky for stoking Moscow’s invasion of his country.

The vast divide between the two candidates' positions on Ukraine is visible in the campaign's final days. While both candidates are focused on Pennsylvania’s Latino and Black voters, Trump’s attention to the full-scale war and large voting diaspora are at a minimum. For Harris, her surrogates are ramping up outreach to Americans of Ukrainian roots in crucial swing states.

After hiring Jotevski to lead national diaspora efforts in September and placing him in Pennsylvania for the race’s final stretch, Harris’s campaign is rallying Americans with Ukrainian roots to door-knock in Philadelphia’s suburbs. Nearly half of Pennsylvania’s Ukrainian diaspora of between 100,000 and 200,000 reside in that area.

“While Donald Trump cozies up to dictators like Putin and idolizes fascists like Hitler, Vice President Kamala Harris will never waver in her defense of America’s security and ideals or the people of Ukraine,” Jotevski said.

But Harris-canvassing Ukrainians are disappointed by the diaspora's small but passionate turnout for the Democratic nominee, citing concerns that many in their community are quietly voting for Trump over domestic issues like the economy.

“Maybe 30-40% (of Pennsylvania’s Ukrainian community) is for Harris, and the (rest), the majority is still for Trump,” said Marta Fedoriw, a prominent figure in the region’s Ukrainian diaspora community.

“We know that Ukrainian Americans were very Republican years ago, because of the Republican Party, (President Dwight D.) Eisenhower, (Ronald) Reagan, strong anti-Soviet Union (feelings), but since these last few elections they’ve turned the Ukrainian vote (silent), they’re still voting for Trump but they don’t want to talk about it.”

Fedoriw, who is the chair of the Return Ukraine’s Children initiative at the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, has been rallying across Pennsylvania for the Ukrainian community to vote for Harris, including at an Oct. 26 event co-sponsored by the Harris campaign. She says it’s not that clear why so many in the state’s diaspora plan to vote for Trump.

She hears Ukrainians say things like, ‘Trump is a businessman, we need a tough guy to deal with Putin,’ and ‘What has Biden done for Ukraine, he’s been slowly doling out support.’

Both Trump and Harris-supporting Ukrainians in Pennsylvania who spoke with the Kyiv Independent are frustrated by the Biden Administration’s slow drip of aid to Ukraine that has at times been delayed and repeated contradictions of previously stated red lines, such as the delivery of Western fighter jets.

Because of what she hears, Fedoriw knows the Harris campaign’s targeting of Eastern Europeans is needed, especially to reach the state’s 700,000 Polish Americans.

Despite widely shared fears in the state’s Polish community that Putin’s sights are set beyond Ukraine, Fedoriw says the population’s ties to the Roman Catholic Church are so deep that Harris’s stance on abortion rights is pushing many toward Trump.

Others disagree, such as Pennsylvania’s Polish American community leaders, who endorsed Harris after she gave the community recognition in the campaign’s only Harris-Trump debate.

“Why don’t you (Trump) tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up (Ukraine,” Harris said in the debate.

But no diaspora community is a monolith. The Harris campaign hosted a Polish American bus tour across Pennsylvania two weeks out from the election and took nearly a dozen Ukrainians canvassing on Oct. 26 after a rally to reach Ukrainian voters.

Speakers at the event included Victoria Nuland, the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and Alexander Vindman, the Ukraine-born former director for European Affairs for the U.S. National Security Council.

Two days later, the former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger and other Harris surrogates told Scranton, Pennsylvania voters that a vote for Harris and running mate Tim Walz is a vote for the continued support of NATO and Ukraine.

However, some of the few dozen passionate Ukrainians at the rally reserved feelings of fear that the Harris campaign’s efforts aren’t reaching swayable Ukrainians and may even be too little too late.

Fedoriw said the huge voting block has pockets of Ukrainian voters who still associate Democrats with communism and, despite their hopes for Ukraine’s sovereignty, can’t come around on voting for Harris.

“That really hit me, how few people were at the rally,” Lashchyk-Tytla, the Ukrainian from Philadelphia’s suburbs, said. “The turnout was horrible (given) the amount of Ukrainians we have here.”

The Trump campaign is equally spending the final stretch in Pennsylvania but is more focused on reaching Black voters and relaying messages about “election integrity” than allocating resources to door-knocking.

If the Trump campaign is doing outreach to Pennsylvania’s Eastern Europeans, the message isn’t reaching Ukrainians around Philadelphia, according to multiple leaders in the Ukrainian community who spoke with the Kyiv Independent in the campaign’s final days.

The Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their approach to reaching diaspora communities.

Just north of Philadelphia in Jenkintown, the heart of the Ukrainian community, attendees of the last Sunday service of October at the St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church spilled into a dining hall for a nonpartisan town hall on the significance of the election for Ukraine. The county’s Board of Elections Commissioner, Neil Makhija, who broadened the language accessibility of voter material, took questions from the nearly two dozen attendees.

“This is an existential issue for Ukrainian American communities, they understand the contrast has never been more clear between the presidential candidates,” Makhija told the Kyiv Independent.

“There’s one who would essentially let Ukraine disappear and another who is backing the existence of the country.”

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