LANCASTER COUNTY, Pennsylvania — About 100 miles west of Washington, D.C., at the intersection of quiet country roads, a thriving network of small businesses and community ties are poised to deliver the battleground state of Pennsylvania to President-elect Donald Trump. It was useful.
For nearly a decade, with the smell of fresh manure and homemade hazel pies in their nostrils, Republican operatives have worked diligently to register the Amish, a voting group free from the courts.
Despite their efforts, attendance at polling stations was long delayed. The reason was unknown to outsiders, but it was obvious to locals. Election Day is on Tuesday, and for many Amish, weddings are also on Tuesday.
This religious rural group traditionally only holds weddings on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the fall, when the harvest season begins.
So this year, a group of local Republicans came together to complete an effort started by national Republicans to provide direct rides from Amish weddings to polling places.
“This was a missionary effort to reach the hard-to-reach,” organizer Leesa Burwell Perry, an avid churchgoer and teacher's wife, told the Post. “This is about neighbors helping neighbors.”
On Election Day, 200 community members drove about 26,000 people from an Amish wedding venue to the polls to vote for Trump, according to Burwell Perry's tally. Voter turnout was one of the highest in recent history for the region.
“Operation Help My Neighbor”
The initiative began days before Election Day, when Ms. Burwell-Perry took, in her words, “17 seconds” to create a flyer with a phone number to call for a free ride to the polls, and when she said, “Help your neighbor.” They started an activity called “Operation Yoyo''. From the basement of Bainbridge Church.
Burwell Perry, who lived in a non-Amish area for many years, said Amish weddings typically last from dawn to dusk, with a short break between church services, and only a few opportunities for wedding guests to go to the polls. I knew it would be short.
However, even that was difficult as traveling by horse and carriage was time consuming.
Armed with this knowledge and “a lot of prayers,” Burwell Perry used his November mortgage payment to print 10,000 flyers, pay local residents to deliver them to his farm, and spend his November mortgage payment on them. He said he sometimes put him in a stroller parked across the street from his house in the southern county. to the state's majority Amish population.
Elon Musk's America PAC subsequently promised to pay compensation to Burwell Perry and gave her about 30 computers and Starlink devices so she and fellow local activists could run a call center from the church basement. I lent her the little money I had.
By the morning of Nov. 5, organizers had assembled and vetted the 200 drivers providing rides and the dozens of phone bankers who would take calls. But first Burwell Perry needed to find a wedding.
Like Amish church services, Amish weddings are often held in farmhouses, the location of which is kept a closely guarded secret, and the bride's father usually only reveals the details of his daughter's wedding verbally in church. Announce.
With the help of her Amish neighbors, Burwell-Perry learned that only a few weddings would be held on Election Day.
She then appointed Lancaster County residents Brenda Biesecker-Claire and Joe Goody to act as scouts to find Amish families who would head to local farms on Tuesday mornings. It made sense to head to the wedding on Sunday.
Once they found their wedding venue, they offered a ride and called Burwell Perry's address, and the team (including Mennonite and Amish volunteers) would dispatch additional drivers to the venue.
Biesecker-Claire called what she saw a “modern-day miracle.”
“When the load is on [of Amish] If I get out of my car at a wedding, they'll say, “Can you wait here for a second?” And they say, 'I'm going to tell my brother,'” she said. “And my brother will come out with his wife, her sister, and her husband.”
“And that went on all day.”
Amish-Republican crossover
So what do this group of people who are so humble as to not even put their faces on their daughter's baby doll have in common with a former reality TV star, real estate mogul, and former president?
Dozens of Amish, Mennonites and former Amish interviewed by the Post this week said many of the group's most deeply held beliefs, such as restricting government and religious freedom, were closely tied to the Republican campaign platform.
For John Henry Smucker, 28, it was President Trump's anti-establishment beliefs that resonated with him. Growing up on an Amish dairy farm, he saw his family repeatedly raided by Food and Drug Administration agents looking for raw dairy products.
“My father was a farmer and sold all the produce he produced on his farm. So we made cottage cheese, ice cream, yogurt, and also sold raw milk,” he wrote in the post. told the paper. “And I myself have experienced government overreach. We would be attacked. Nothing was taken, but we were threatened.
“I saw things like this happening and said responsible American citizens need to know whether they want to drink raw milk or not. They put so many pesticides and poisons into our lives. Are you trying to tell me that this substance that is good for us is illegal when we put it in our food? Yeah, that was a big thing for me growing up and it shaped my conservative tendencies. It was.”
In January, the same issue infuriated the Lancaster County Amish. One of the largest local agricultural products stores in the area… Amos Miller Organic Farm — targeted by the FDA. Investigators seized thousands of dollars worth of raw milk and other products, including granola, that Miller sold for a living.
The Amos Miller incident galvanized many Amish to say they had had enough of excess.
“You'll often hear people say, 'I'm going to take a knee and vote,'” one Amish woman who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Post. “They just want to be alone because they don’t want to deal with the government.
“But now the government has come to our rescue.”
Smucker agreed, saying: “If these groups want to maintain their freedom to assemble in places and not in secret, and keep Christian freedom alive, they must express their opinions and beliefs, not just in elections, but in elections as well. This is true in federal elections, but especially in local elections. ”
Musk acknowledged this sentiment in an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson last week.
“Democrats certainly made mistakes because there was government overreach… that shut down some Amish farmers and that really upset them,” said the head of Tesla, X and SpaceX. “And we just need to be able to communicate the fact that they're upset and say, 'Well, there's something you can do about it. It's called a vote. We're happy to tell them.'”
Other issues that resonated with would-be Amish voters included restrictions on abortion and widespread use of sex-reassignment surgeries for children.
When Burwell Perry's volunteers showed up, they found an enthusiastic audience.
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said volunteer Levi King, who was raised Amish but left the church as an adult. “So many people wanted to vote.”
“Voting is the only thing we can do to maintain this way of life.”
In terms of numbers
There are just over 90,000 Amish people in Pennsylvania, and about half of them are eligible to vote, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.
However, estimates before 2024 showed that only about 10% of religious groups voted.
National Republican organizers recognized the potential support available, but a lack of community understanding hampered their efforts.
“Local party activists who registered Amish voters in 2016 and 2020 were making claims that were far greater than reality,” Elizabethtown history and Anabaptism studies professor Stephen Nolt wrote in the Post. told.
Trump himself fell into the same trap when he held a rally in Lancaster County on Nov. 3.
When the Republican candidate pointed out that there were no Amish participants, the crowd shouted back: “It's Sunday! They're in church!”
The Amish alone did not secure Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes for President Trump. As of Monday night, the Republican candidate had a lead of just over 144,000 votes over Vice President Kamala Harris, with 99% of the votes counted.
“First of all, the combined adult Amish population in York, Dauphin and Lebanon counties is only about 1,300,” Nolt said. “And even if 100% of voters in Lancaster were registered and turnout was 100%, that would only be about 18,000 people. [Amish.]”
Counting Amish votes is a painstaking process that can take months or years to complete, Nolt said, but a Post analysis found that raw data from rural counties in Pennsylvania with a large Amish population The results show a marked improvement in voter turnout.
Statewide, there were about 40,000 fewer votes cast in 2024 than in 2020. However, the number of votes cast in Lancaster, Chester, Lebanon, Dauphin, and York counties increased by 27,080 votes, or about 2.56% of the region's total of 1,083,531 votes cast.
An additional 10,048 votes were cast in Chester County. Another 1,185 in Lebanon County. 313 more in Dauphin; Lancaster County increased by 8,729 people and York County by 6,805 people, according to Pennsylvania's official election data.
Local activists say the increase in rural voting should not be taken lightly. On Monday, Burwell Perry was already knocking on doors and visiting area barns to register more Amish to participate in the upcoming election.
“The Amish showed up,” Biesecker-Claire said. “When they show up, you know the situation is serious.”
