The Amish don’t read Donald Trump’s tweets and can’t watch his television appearances, and voting is practically against their religion.

But that’s not stopping a group of Trump allies with ties to Ben Carson and Newt Gingrich from mounting a campaign to turn them out anyway.


Amish PAC was started by an alum of a pro-Carson super PAC, an ex-Amish donor to that super PAC and an employee of Gingrich Productions. The group is planning to mount an old-fashioned, billboards-and-newspaper-ads effort this summer, designed to encourage Amish people in Pennsylvania and Ohio to turn out for Trump in November.

Ben Walters, fundraising counsel to the group and a former fundraiser for the pro-Carson 2016 Committee, concedes the group faces an uphill task.

“I’ve got to say, I don’t know that we’re going to change voting habits drastically,” Walters said in an interview on Friday. “But we can only help them.”

According to a study from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, there are just under 70,000 Amish people each in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But these states are likely to be battlegrounds, and Amish PAC expects every vote will count.

“In Florida in 2000, it came down to a couple polling places,” Walters said. “What if that happened in Ohio or Pennsylvania? It could.”

The Amish vote is especially difficult to turn out: Believers adhere to a strict interpretation of Christianity that discourages most participation in the modern world, from technology to voting. Voting is not technically outlawed, but it is strongly discouraged by many church leaders.

Donald Kraybill, an expert on the Amish people at Elizabethtown College, said he guesses that the most generous turnout scenario would be about 2,000 Amish voters each in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

In 2004, President George W. Bush received about 1,300 Amish votes in heavily Amish Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, he said — the product of the most successful political outreach to the community in recent memory.

“George W. Bush is not Donald Trump,” said Kraybill, whom the PAC is hoping to consult (he declined to say whether he would respond to it, though he hasn’t yet).

“There’s a lot of aspects about Trump that are antithetical to Amish values and Amish beliefs,” Kraybill said. “This is a very different situation now than it was in 2004.”

Gabe Neville, formerly a longtime aide and chief of staff to Rep. Joe Pitts, a Republican whose district includes Lancaster County, is also skeptical that Bush’s success could be replicated — at least by Trump.

“Pennsylvania and Ohio, these are states often won on the margins … a small number of votes from any group can in theory swing the election; theoretically, it might not take a lot of new Amish votes to affect the election,” he said. “That said, Donald Trump is very different from the Amish in a lot of ways. Bush was able to relate to the Amish on a personal level; he was [perceived as] an authentic Christian. Trump’s star power, celebrity and tech savvy are useless with the Amish.”

Bush, taking a markedly different approach from Trump’s flashy, camera-heavy campaigning style, flew in and met quietly with community leaders in Lancaster County in 2004 — without photographers, in keeping with the Amish preference to avoid appearing in photos.

“The Amish told the president that not all members of the church vote but they would pray for him,” read a report from a local Lancaster paper at the time. “Bush had tears in his eyes when he replied. He said the president needs their prayers.”

Core Amish principles require rejecting pride and embracing humility — an awkward fit for a bombastic presidential candidate who brags about being “a winner.”

“The Amish really strongly emphasize humility, the last thing Trump emphasizes,” Kraybill said. “In terms of his marital record, divorce, for example, is cause for excommunication. It’s not just frowned upon, it’s cause for excommunication.”

But, he noted, since the Amish don’t watch TV, it’s unclear how well-versed they are in Trump’s personal past, which includes three marriages and raunchy talk about women.

“I’m not certain how they take some of the rhetoric,” said Dave Dumeyer, chairman of the Lancaster County GOP. “But those I hear about are probably fairly supportive of the policies. So whether that’s going to be sufficient to engage them, I don’t know.”

Walters, who has family in Amish-heavy northern Indiana and grew up visiting those communities, knows that Trump’s brash style and flamboyant personal history are at odds with the Amish approach. But Amish people — as well as Mennonites and other Anabaptists considered part of the “Plain people” — admire his business success, he said, and that offers common ground.

“One group of people and one person are completely different from each other,” Walters said. But, noting that Trump won Lancaster County — though it’s unclear how many Amish people voted in the primary — he continued, “They appreciate his business savvy, they appreciate the fact that he built such a successful business, they see someone who’s going to be pro-innovation, less government regulation, someone who’s going to lower taxes.”

That’s true, said Kraybill. But Trump’s business practices are very much out of step with with those of the Amish community. Bankruptcies — something Trump has faced four times — are cause for excommunication in Amish communities, as is filing a lawsuit. Trump has not exactly shied away from litigious tendencies, suggesting that he would make it easier, under his administration, to sue journalists.

Still, the socially conservative Amish voters are deeply uncomfortable with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and Amish PAC is hopeful they can turn out conservative-minded people both for Trump and also for Pat Toomey and Rob Portman, the Republican senators up for reelection in Pennsylvania and Ohio, respectively.

Ben King, the onetime Carson donor, was raised Amish but has since left the fold. He still lives in Lancaster County, where he runs an Amish barn-building business. He maintains ties to the community, Walters said, and is the PAC’s emissary on the ground.

The group has raised about $10,000 so far, Walters said, though most of that money has gone into list rental and other “start-up” costs. It has entered list rental agreements with the Carson-linked 2016 Committee and a group backing controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“I can tell you there is excitement in the air for Trump's candidacy,” read a recent email blast from the group disseminated by the 2016 Committee (subject line: “The Amish are excited for Trump.”). “Why? Amish folks realize that a Trump administration is sure to include strong conservatives like Newt Gingrich, Dr. Ben Carson and Sheriff Joe Arpaio in key roles.”

Walters said the email name-checked those individuals because they were early endorsers of Trump, not because of business agreements (they operate independently of both Carson and Gingrich, he said).

He went on to say that the actual placing of newspaper ads and billboards should cost only about $40,000.

“For your goal to be so relatively low in comparison to what all of these other super PACs are raising and spending, this is a giant swath of people in key swing states,” Walters said. “There’s going to be no political noise intruding on the message. Donors are getting huge bang for the buck.”

The ad campaign is set to begin around the time of the Republican National Convention, he said.

“Some of them do vote, some don’t vote, some are very strict about not voting, some have bishops that come in and just squelch it completely,” Walters said. But his group, he continued, is focused on “just the margins. Moving the margins.”