Why The Amish Could Decide This Year’s Presidential Race
The rolling green hills of Lancaster County — known as “Amish country” — are famous for a few things. Roadside farm stands selling juicy red apples and men driving horse-drawn buggies are two things you can’t miss.
Roughly 1,000 square-miles in size, Lancaster Country could also soon be known as the place that helped Donald Trump defeat Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.
Over the past few months, Republicans have been crisscrossing Lancaster County and other rural parts of the state with one mission: Turn this reluctant and reclusive religious group into MAGA voters.
READ: How 40 Protestant Denominations Voted In The Last 4 Presidential Elections
In fact, this untapped pool of 80,000 voters — the same number by which Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020 — could result in the former president winning the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania and indeed the entire race.
The Amish are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christians with Swiss origins. Aside from shunning technology and other modern conveniences, this insular group maintains a degree of separation from non-Amish communities.
The Amish, who are related to Old Order Mennonites and Conservative Mennonites, are known for simple living and plain dress. They value rural life (most of them work as farmers) and believe in the submission to God’s will.
The term Amish was first used as a term of disgrace in the early 1700s by opponents of Jakob Amman, an Anabaptist leader. Many Amish and Mennonites immigrated to Pennsylvania for a variety of reasons starting in the 18th century to escape persecution in Europe.
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An untapped demographic
Estimates of Amish turnout in previous elections have been difficult to determine.
A 2020 study found a record turnout from the community that year, which grew slightly two years late during the midterms. Nonetheless, the number of votes in Lancaster County, where most Pennsylvania Amish live, did not even reach 3,000 during the 2020 presidential race.
This low turnout isn’t new. In 2004, George W. Bush toured eastern Pennsylvania and made it a point to reach out. The result was a record turnout of about 13%. In both 2016 and 2020, a group called Amish PAC spent $150,000 on signs and mailers with help from the county’s Republican Party.
In fact, the Amish have not voted in past races in very high numbers. That makes the Amish an untapped demographic and one that could tilt the state in Trump’s favor come Nov. 5.
Two Amish men hold up a Trump lawn sign. (Photo via X)
GOP activists hit the ground
Digital ads don’t work here — the Amish don’t own TVs, computers or smartphones — so GOP activists have had to go door-to-door and to farmers markets to register voters. They hope Trump’s message will appeal to the Amish, especially in the context of culture war politics.
Spearheading the effort is Early Vote Action, a group founded last year by Scott Presler. The political action committee was created with the aim of winning Pennsylvania.
“With the help of Early Vote Action’s dedicated volunteers, we have contacted hundreds of thousands of voters since the inception of our organization,” the group says on its website.
The group added: “Using proven methods of voter contact — handwritten postcards and letters, text messages, phone calls, and, of course, boots on the ground — the EVA network has dramatically shifted voter registration totals in counties across America in favor of Republicans.”
EVA Executive Director Scott Presler said he is using voter registration strategies he learned in Florida as a model for efforts in five other battleground states, including Pennsylvania.
“Now with nearly a million more registered Republicans than Democrats, the Democrats aren’t even focused on Florida in this election cycle, the dollars the donors, the Democrats are pulling out of Florida,” Presler said. “My goal is to ‘Florida’ Pennsylvania.”
Presler called the Amish community “pro-religious freedom, pro-school choice, pro-bodily autonomy, they don’t want the forced vaccinations” — values that, he added, align with the Republican Party.
Social media is also filled with photos of Amish men holding up Trump signs — a sign that this effort is cutting through. But 3,000 votes won’t help Trump win the state, meaning more Amish voters need to be registered ahead of election day.
In addition, Presler has been on a media blitz as the election draws closer. Democrats, meanwhile, have gone out of their way to discredit him, even calling Presler “an election-denying conspiracy theorist.”
A view of the Philadelphia skyline. (Unsplash photo)
Democrats look to the suburbs
To counter this move, Harris’ campaign laid out what it sees as her path to victory in the state in a memo shared with NBC News.
The Democratic presidential nominee is not focused on religious voters in rural parts of the state — a place that also includes traditional Catholics — but suburban voters. With voters in large urban areas, like Philadelphia, already voting in large numbers for Democrats, Harris is looking to pad her numbers and win the state.
At the same time, Harris hopes to convert the nearly 160,000 voters in the state who cast ballots for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the GOP primary — even after she had dropped out of the race — to their side.
“The Harris campaign’s path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” according to the memo. “We have flipped the suburbs from red to blue since Trump won them in 2020, and we have also grown our support with women and tripled our support among white college educated voters in the state.”
Clemente Lisi is the executive editor of Religion Unplugged. He previously served as deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and a longtime reporter at The New York Post. Follow him on X @ClementeLisi.