Election Analysis: The Amish Did Not Make The Difference In PA

That’s the clear message from Steven Nolt of Elizabethtown College. He has analyzed the numbers and shares why with us today.

This comes in contrast to one recent headline (“It’s too early to know whether Amish voters ‘delivered’ Pennsylvania for Trump, researchers say“).

Rather, Nolt says that “It IS too early to know how many Amish voted, but it’s not too early to know that Amish voters did not deliver Pennsylvania for Trump.” (emphasis added)

The “Amish Vote” was way overblown

I’m glad to share this, because I noticed more “Amish vote” election coverage this year than in any previous election cycle in the past 16+ years (more on that below).

And I think the media coverage of the Amish vote really got ahead of itself.

I’ve spent the past weeks reading about “unprecedented numbers” of Amish voters, the “growing power of the Amish vote”, and claims of more Amish voters than actual Amish people in the state of Pennsylvania.

While the nitty-gritty details might not be known for awhile (as explained below), it’s worth putting to bed the idea that the Amish vote is some huge and critical bloc.

Though, you might be forgiven for thinking that – given all the attention it got in the final stages of the 2024 presidential election campaign.

Steven Nolt: Why The Amish Did NOT Deliver PA For President Trump

So here’s more from Steven Nolt – on why he can say that the Amish did not deliver Pennsylvania for President-Elect Trump:

As you know and understand it will take up many months for us to figure out how many Amish voted, as we (1) purchase the voter registration roles in January for this November, which by then will indicate who voted and how (in-person or by mail), and then (2) compare those names and addresses with the directories.

Because the Amish who produce Amish church directories specifically say their directories should not be scanned or digitized, we do not scan or digitize them, and thus the process of determining registered Amish voters is a time-consuming task.

But there are a few things we can surmise at this point, and one is that, in a statistical sense, any Amish vote in Lancaster County did not make a difference in the election outcome for Pennsylvania. (emphasis added)

More:

A headline in yesterday’s LNP said “It’s too early to know whether Amish voters ‘delivered’ Pennsylvania for Trump, researchers say,” and quoted me. The headline is incorrect.

It IS too early to know how many Amish voted, but it’s not too early to know that Amish voters did not deliver Pennsylvania for Trump.  Here’s why, statistically:

Trump carried Pennsylvania by more than 130,000 votes. And, yes, on one level, every Republican voters across the state contributed to that number in a tiny way, but the larger context is that Lancaster County, as a whole, contributed nothing to Trump carrying PA. Lancaster County’s Republican vote did not shift at all from 2020 to 2024.

See: https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/pennsylvania/?r=0 – And choose the radio button “Counties” under the heading “How voters in Pennsylvania moved between elections.”

I’ve gone ahead and done that for you, and captured it in a screenshot.

Here you can see a shift of “+0” – neither towards Democrats nor Republicans – for Lancaster County in the middle of the shot:

More explanation from Nolt – on which voters actually delivered PA for Trump:

Lancaster County’s vote was the 16^th least Republican of the state’s 67 counties. Lancaster’s vote was no more Republican this time as compared with 2020. Most counties, including much more populous counties, shifted Republican, meaning they contributed to Trump’s flipping of Pennsylvania.

If every county had returned the same share of its vote to Donald Trump in 2024 as it had in 2020 (which is what Lancaster County did), the result would have been a statewide victory for Harris.

Instead, many counties, including the state’s most populous counties, returned greater shares of their vote for Trump in 2024, which is what produced an outcome different from that of 2020. Lancaster was not among these counties.

So where specifically did those votes come from?

The reason the state went for Trump was because he won a greater share of the vote in Philadelphia, the Philly suburbs, Erie, Northampton (which is Allentown suburbs), and because some of the rural counties, like Berks and Luzerne (which is Scranton suburbs), all of which shifted Republican, unlike Lancaster, which remained static.

Lancaster’s Republican party leaders will claim they made a big difference in the election outcome—and that’s their job, to make such claims—but they didn’t, statistically speaking.

The Philly suburbs turned out for Trump in big numbers, unlike in 2020, and Democrats in Philly itself stayed home, and some rural counties went in for Trump much more than in 2020. Lancaster delivered the same vote percentages it did in 2020.

But offering a static return does nothing to change the election outcome. Put another way, Lancaster’s vote totals contributed to the overall state totals, but not to the different outcome (2024 compared with 2020).

In summary:

The different outcome this time is a result of many counties, and especially the most populous counties, shifting their vote toward Donald Trump.

And, so, since Lancaster’s entire vote contributed nothing, statistically, to the flipping of PA, any subset of Lancaster voters, including Amish voters within Lancaster, also didn’t make a difference in the state outcome.

Some local vote totals

Nolt provided vote totals for 22 precincts with sizable Amish populations (see below). As you’ll see, the votes cast for Donald Trump were not hugely different from those cast in 2020.

Nolt notes a few caveats:

1. As I’ve said, we do not know (yet) how many Amish voted.
2. The vote totals below are for all votes cast for Trump in the voting districts listed, meaning it’s a mix of Amish and non-Amish and not differentiated.
3. These are the leading municipalities in terms of Amish population; there are additional municipalities in Lancaster County with Amish residents – these are just the major ones.

Notwithstanding these three statements, it seems clear there was no overwhelming number of additional votes for Trump in these Amish-heavy townships in 2024 as compared with 2020. Some municipal counts were up marginally, and some were down marginally.

But the overall picture is one of not much change other than what one would expect from natural population increase. Again, we won’t know until we know, but these figures suggest that we’ll not find huge numbers of newly-registered and -voting Amish in Lancaster County in 2024 as compared with 2020.

A political activist responds

Nolt also shared this analysis with a Republican activist to get her view. She presented an alternative explanation:

She stated that it’s theoretically possible these 2024 numbers could reflect a situation in which large numbers of non-Amish Republican voters in these municipalities sat out the 2024 election and were replaced with a large number of new Amish voters in these districts.

Nolt’s response:

And she’s technically right; theoretically that’s possible. But that seems highly unlikely to me.

There was no indication that lots and lots of non-Amish rural Lancaster residents sat out this election. On the contrary, yard signs, precinct voting lines, and so forth, suggest the rural voter numbers were simply on par with 2020.

There probably were some more Amish voters than in 2020, as there were some more non-Amish voters, because the population increased.

But the results of the election were not significantly different from 2020 in local terms, and Lancaster’s vote did not contribute to the shift in the state’s overall vote.

On the Amish being driven to polling places

In closing, Nolt adds this final note of interest – on the (hardly new) idea of Amish getting rides to polling places:

Some national news stories after the election made a lot of the fact that some Lancaster Amish folks got rides to polling places, and suggested that having non-Amish volunteers drive Amish people to polling places represented a game-changing development that could have facilitated a much, much larger Amish turnout.

In some of the stories, the fact that an Amish person was willing to ride in a car was proof that a major change was somehow underway. But readers of Amish America know that riding in a car or van is not prohibited.

The problem with this theory is that the practice is not new. Non-Amish folks have driven Amish people to the polls in Lancaster for decades.

For example, the late Harold Hess (he died about a decade ago, in his 90s), was a longtime Lancaster Republican Party stalwart who got Lancaster Amish registered to vote and arranged to get them to the polls in the 1980s, if not earlier.

Having party activists drive Amish to vote is not new. What is new is that, in the current media landscape, it attracted attention and photographs.

And here’s more on the common practice of Amish hiring drivers.

The Amish Vote: More media story than meaningful

Thanks to Steven Nolt for sharing this analysis with us.

The “Amish vote” exists – but it remains marginal.

And too marginal in most elections (barring, say, a razor-thin Florida 2000-type situation) to make much of a difference. This aligns with my skepticism of a month ago.

Perhaps that will be a different story ten, or even twenty years from now, when the Amish population has likely doubled – and/or if Amish become more frequent and consistent voters.

But for now, the “Amish vote” is much more media fodder than it is something that has any real impact on American elections.

Steven Nolt is professor of history and Anabaptist studies and director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

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