Based on a NY Post report: About 100 miles to the west of Washington D.C., in a rural part of Pennsylvania, lies a collection of small businesses and community networks that were instrumental in securing the state for President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election. For nearly ten years, Republicans have been making efforts to reach an often-overlooked group — the Amish — by working tirelessly to register voters from this demographic, all while navigating the scents of fresh manure and the aroma of homemade shoofly pie.
Despite these efforts, voter turnout had been disappointingly low for years, a phenomenon that puzzled outsiders but was obvious to those familiar with the community. The issue? Election Day happens on a Tuesday — the same day many Amish weddings take place.
The Amish, a deeply religious and rural group, traditionally schedule their weddings only on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the fall, aligning with the start of the harvest season.
To address this, local Republicans devised a plan: they would provide car rides directly from Amish weddings to the polling stations, ensuring that voters wouldn’t miss the chance to cast their ballots.
“This was a missionary effort to reach an unreached people,” explained Liesa Burwell-Perry, an active church member and wife of a teacher, when speaking with The Post. “This is about neighbors helping neighbors.”
By her estimate, 200 local volunteers managed to transport around 26,000 Amish people to the polls, significantly boosting voter turnout and marking one of the highest turnout rates the region has seen in years.
The initiative began days ahead of Election Day when Burwell-Perry quickly created a flyer containing phone numbers for free rides to the polls, launching “Operation Help Thy Neighbor” from her church basement in Bainbridge.
Having lived in the area for many years, Burwell-Perry understood that Amish weddings typically run from dawn until dusk, with only a brief break between church services. This limited timeframe meant that attendees often had little opportunity to vote, especially given the time-consuming travel via horse-drawn carriage.
Armed with this insight — and a great deal of prayer — Burwell-Perry spent her November mortgage payment to print 10,000 copies of her flyer and paid locals to deliver them to Amish farms or slip them into buggies across southern Pennsylvania, home to the largest Amish population in the state.
Elon Musk’s America PAC eventually offered to reimburse her, even providing Burwell-Perry with 30 computers and a Starlink device to establish a call center in her church basement.
By the morning of November 5, Burwell-Perry had assembled and vetted 200 drivers and gathered a team of phone bank volunteers to assist. However, the real challenge lay in locating the weddings.
Amish weddings, much like their church services, are usually held in farmhouses, with the locations kept tightly secret. Fathers of the brides traditionally announce the wedding details to churchgoers by word-of-mouth only.
With the help of some Amish neighbors, Burwell-Perry discovered a few weddings taking place on Election Day. She enlisted Brenda Biesecker Clair and Joe Goody, residents of Lancaster County, to act as scouts, seeking out Amish families dressed in their Sunday best — a surefire sign they were headed to a wedding.
Once a wedding was located, Biesecker Clair and Goody would offer rides, and then report the wedding addresses back to Burwell-Perry, who would dispatch additional drivers from her team, which included Mennonite and Amish volunteers.
Biesecker Clair described the experience as “a modern-day miracle.”
“If a load [of Amish] got out of my car at a wedding, they would be like, ‘Can you wait here a minute?’ and they would say, ‘I’m gonna go tell my brother,’” she recalled. “And then the brother would come out with his wife and her sister and husband.”
“And it just went on like that all day.”
So how did a group of people so committed to humility that they don’t even put faces on their daughters’ dolls align with a former reality TV star and real estate mogul-turned-president?
According to many Amish, Mennonite, and ex-Amish individuals who spoke with The Post, the common ground lay in their shared values, such as limited government and religious freedom, which closely aligned with Republican campaign platforms.
For 28-year-old John Henry Smucker, who grew up on an Amish dairy farm, it was Trump’s anti-establishment stance that resonated most. Smucker recalled how his family’s farm was frequently raided by the FDA, seeking out raw milk products.
“My dad was a farmer who sold all his own products from the farm, so we made cottage cheese, ice cream, yogurt, and we sold raw milk,” he told The Post. “And so I experienced the government overreach myself. We would get raided. We never got stuff taken out, but we would get threats.”
“I’d see this stuff going on and I said, you know, a responsible American citizen should know if they want to drink raw milk or not. You know, they put so many pesticides and you know, poison into our food, and they want to tell me that this stuff that’s good for us is illegal? So, yeah, so that was a big deal to me growing up, and it did shape my leanings my conservative.”
This very issue had stirred many in Lancaster County earlier in the year when Amos Miller Organic Farm, one of the area’s largest, was targeted by the FDA. Investigators seized thousands of dollars worth of raw milk and other goods, such as granola, which Miller sold.
The incident galvanized the Amish community, many of whom felt that government overreach had gone too far.
“You’ll hear people say a lot that they ‘vote with their knees,’” one Amish woman who wished to remain anonymous told The Post. “They don’t want to be involved with the government and just want to be left alone. But now, the government has come for us.”
Smucker agreed, adding: “If these groups wish to keep the freedom they have to gather in places, not in secret, and continue to live their Christian freedoms, they have to voice their opinion and their beliefs in not only elections, or not only in federal elections, but especially local elections.”
Elon Musk acknowledged this sentiment during an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.
“The Democrats did make a mistake because there was government overreach … that shut down some Amish farmers, which really made them upset,” the Tesla, X, and SpaceX CEO said. “And you just need to be able to channel that, the fact that they’re upset, like, ‘Well, there’s a thing you can do about it, which is called voting, and we’re happy to transport.’”
Other issues that resonated with Amish voters included restrictions on abortion and the growing trend of gender transition surgeries for children.
When Burwell-Perry’s volunteers arrived, they were met with enthusiasm.
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said Levi King, a former Amish who now works as a volunteer. “So many wanted to vote.”
“Voting is the one thing you can do to preserve this way of life.”
Pennsylvania is home to over 90,000 Amish people, with about half eligible to vote, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.
Before 2024, it was estimated that only around 10% of Amish voters cast their ballots.
While national Republicans were aware of the Amish’s potential to sway the vote, their lack of insight into the community hindered their outreach efforts.
“In 2016 and 2020, local party activists who registered Amish voters made claims that turned out to be much greater than the reality turned out to be,” said Steven Nolt, a professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College.
Trump himself fell victim to the same misjudgment during a rally in Lancaster County on November 3, when he remarked that he had not seen any Amish in the crowd. The audience responded, chanting: “It’s Sunday! They’re at church!”
The Amish alone didn’t give Trump Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes. As of Monday evening, Trump was leading Vice President Kamala Harris by just over 144,000 votes, with nearly all votes counted.
“For one thing, the entire Amish adult population in York, Dauphin, and Lebanon counties combined is only about 1,300 people,” Nolt said. “And even if 100% of Lancaster’s eligible voters were registered and had a 100% turn-out rate, that would only be about 18,000 [Amish].”
While the exact number of Amish voters is still being tallied, early data suggests a marked increase in turnout from Amish-heavy, rural Pennsylvania counties.
In Lancaster, Chester, Lebanon, Dauphin, and York counties, the vote count rose by 27,080 ballots, a 2.56% increase in total votes from the region.
Local activists believe this increase in rural votes should not be underestimated. On Monday, Burwell-Perry was already knocking on doors and visiting barns to register even more Amish voters for the next election.
{Matzav.com}
