LANCASTER, Pa. – On a recent weekday afternoon, an Amish man riding a horse-drawn buggy passed a billboard reading “Pray for God’s Mercy on Our Nation” at a busy traffic intersection in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County.

The billboard featured a large picture of a wide-brimmed straw hat commonly worn by the Amish. If there was further doubt about its intended audience, the sponsor’s small print read “Fer Die Amische,” a reference to the Amish in the Pennsylvania German dialect.

Most Amish do not register to vote, researchers say, reflecting the Christian movement’s historical separatism from mainstream society, as they maintain their own dialect and horse-drawn carriage transportation.

But a small minority voted, and the Amish are most numerous in the key state of Pennsylvania. So this year, they are the target of decades-long efforts to get more of them to vote.

Republicans seek their votes through billboards, advertisements, door-to-door canvassing and community meetings. Republican campaigners see the Amish as open to GOP talking points like smaller government, less regulation, religious freedom.

“They just want the government to stay out of not only their business, but their religion,” said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., whose Lancaster County is at the heart of the nation’s largest Amish population. Smucker, whose own family background is Amish, predicted a dramatic increase in Amish votes “based on the enthusiasm we’ve seen.”

Most Amish don’t vote, but in a volatile state, every vote counts

Steven Nolt, director of the Center for Young Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, said such efforts could lead to a surge, but he doesn’t expect the Amish vote to dramatically change the Keystone State’s bottom line.

“For most of Amish history, and in most Amish societies today, Amish people do not vote,” he said. “They didn’t vote, they aren’t voting, and it’s safe to say we won’t be expecting them to in the near future.”

But Nolt said the Amish in a handful of communities in Lancaster and elsewhere typically vote at less than 10% of their population. Oversaw post-election analyzes of voting trends in areas with significant Amish populations; this was a painstaking search that involved manual cross-checking of voter rolls and church directories and could not be carried out in real time during the election.

About 92,000 Amish of all ages currently live in Pennsylvania, according to the Young Center’s research based on a variety of sources, including almanacs, newspapers and directories. About half are in the Lancaster area, with the rest scattered around various parts of the state.

But in a community with many children, fewer than half of the Amish are of voting age, Nolt said. He said he estimates about 3,000 Amish voted in the Lancaster area in 2020, and several hundred elsewhere.

“Even if we imagine it would be a tremendous percentage here in Lancaster, for example… we’re looking at a few hundred, maybe a thousand additional voters,” he said.

That alone wouldn’t come close to flipping a state that favored Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 80,000 votes in 2020.

Of course, the Amish are not the only religious or ethnic constituency that candidates are courting. “In a context where every vote matters, every vote matters,” Nolt said. “But no, we’re not talking about tens of thousands of Amish game.”

Still, Smucker is optimistic that turnout will be higher. He said Republican messages resonated with the changing Amish community.

“It was once again based on agriculture, but its land in Lancaster County was already exhausted,” he said. Only a small minority still engages in farming and many start small businesses; Republicans’ emphasis on limited regulation is appealing. He also said the Amish community perceives Republicans as friendlier to religious freedom and opposed to abortion.

He said the Amish told stories about their ancestors being more likely to vote during debates over compulsory school policies in the 1950s, but the practice has waned since then.

Registration efforts date back to the 1960s, recalls Wayne Wengerd, Ohio state director of the Amish Steering Committee, which manages relations between Amish community leaders and government officials. Get-out-the-vote activists “will go after anyone and everyone they think they can persuade to vote for their party,” he said. “The Amish are no different.”

Amish theology keeps church separate from government

But most Amish abstain from voting in keeping with the “two kingdoms” theology, which creates a clear distinction between earthly government and the church focused on a heavenly kingdom. Wengerd said they saw themselves “primarily as citizens of another kingdom.”

But he noted that some are still voting. “Amish are just like other people,” he said. “Not everyone thinks the same”

Rural Lancaster County has voted Republican for generations, Nolt said, so it’s no surprise that any Amish who vote are also influenced by their neighbors’ preferences. Most Amish voters are registered as Republicans, he said. .

An ad in a Lancaster-area newspaper, attributed to an anonymous “Amish” from Ohio, said that refusing to vote “while everything good our nation stands for is being destroyed” would violate Scripture by failing to “stand against evil.” A voicemail message seeking comment with a phone number left on the ad was not responded to.

Nolt said the ad appeals to a theology similar to mainstream Reformed Protestantism, which says Christians have duties to both God and country, rather than the traditional Amish two-kingdoms theology.

“This is very different from anything in the historical Amish documents that say the responsibility of the church is the church,” he said.

Nolt said a letter sent to Amish residents called for voting Republican but did not specifically target the Amish, touching on issues such as immigration.

The widespread support for Trump among many conservative Christians has long puzzled observers, given his casino ventures, sexual assault allegations, and crude remarks.

But compared to the Amish’s separatist lifestyle, Nolt said, no presidential candidate looks much like them, which is one reason why many of them don’t vote. “Donald Trump’s life is very different from the life of an Amish person, but so is Kamala Harris’s,” he said.

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