For three federal elections in a row, conservative political groups have courted the Amish vote in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Amish in Pennsylvania may have voted in slightly greater numbers this year but did not play a significant role in the election of Donald Trump, who won the state by more than 150,000 votes.

Amish communities have enthusiasm for religious freedom and many conservative principles but have traditionally avoided political participation, making them an attractive untapped source of votes, likely Republican.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, a Republican whose district includes Lancas­ter County and who has an Amish family background, predicted to the Associated Press in October a dramatic increase in Amish votes, based on enthusiasm he saw in the months leading up to the election.

Media outlets reported Amish people registered to vote in unprecedented numbers after state agriculture officials executed a search warrant Jan. 4 at Amish farmer Amos Miller’s farm in Bird-in-Hand to investigate if sales of raw dairy products produced there caused E. coli illnesses in Michigan and New York. Federal law prohibits the sale of raw dairy products across state lines.

Steven Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press that a little under 3,000 Amish in Lancaster County voted in 2020. That was out of about 92,000 Amish of all ages across Pennsylvania, though fewer than half are of voting age.

Nolt plans to study 2024 election participation by comparing voter registration rolls and data to Amish church directories. He anticipates the number of voting Amish was only a little higher than previous years and was not enough to make a difference. Trump’s margin of victory of Pennsylvania was far more than the number of potential Amish voters.

“Lancaster moved about 1% more Republican, but many counties, including much more populous counties, shifted more, meaning they all contributed much more to Trump’s flipping of Pennsylvania than did Lancaster,” Nolt told Anabaptist World. “. . . If Lancas­ter didn’t matter much statistically, the small subset of Amish voters within Lancaster really didn’t make a difference in the state outcome.”