On November 12th, The New York Post posted an article explaining how President Trump got the Amish of Pennsylvania to vote for him. There was a serious get-out-the-vote effort on the part of Republicans, but there was also some government overreach on the part of the Biden administration that sealed the deal.
The article reports:
The effort kicked off days before Election Day, when Burwell-Perry took, in her words, “17 seconds” to whip up a flyer with phone numbers to call for free rides to the polls, launching what she called “Operation Help Thy Neighbor” from her Bainbridge church basement.
A longtime area resident, Burwell-Perry knew that Amish weddings typically last from dawn to dusk, with a brief break between church services — offering just a short window of opportunity for wedding guests to get to the polls.
But the time-consuming nature of transportation by horse-drawn carriage made even that challenging to accomplish.
With this knowledge — and “a lot of prayer” — Burwell-Perry said she spent her November mortgage payment printing out 10,000 copies of her flyer and paying locals to drop them off at farms and slip them into buggies parked across the southern Pennsylvania counties home to the majority of the state’s Amish.
Elon Musk’s America PAC later pledged to reimburse Burwell-Perry, and rented her little-operation-that-could about 30 computers and a Starlink device so she and her fellow local activists could run a call center from a church basement.
By the morning of Nov. 5, the organizer had gathered and vetted 200 drivers to offer rides and dozens of phone bank workers to take calls. But first, Burwell-Perry had to find the weddings.
Like Amish church services, Amish weddings are often held in farmhouses, the locations of which are kept tightly secret — with fathers of the brides usually announcing their daughters’ wedding details only by word-of-mouth in church.
With the help of some Amish neighbors, Burwell-Perry learned of just a handful of weddings happening on Election Day.
She then tapped Lancaster County residents Brenda Biesecker Clair and Joe Goody to act as scouts Tuesday morning, looking for Amish families heading to local farms in their Sunday best — a dead giveaway they were headed to a marriage ceremony.
There was also the issue of farmers protecting their rights:
According to dozens of Amish, Mennonite, and ex-Amish who spoke with The Post this week, many of the groups’ deepest-held beliefs — including limited government and freedom of religion, went hand-in-hand with Republican campaign platforms.
For John Henry Smucker, 28, it was Trump’s anti-establishment beliefs that resonated. Growing up on an Amish dairy farm, he saw his family repeatedly raided by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigators searching for 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.
The policies of the Biden administration are responsible for their election loss.