Blogs and Stories
McCain's Last Hope: The Amish Vote
A plan for winning Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other swing states.
John McCain may have one last, best hope for winning the White House: the Amish. McCain, as we all know, needs to win the Midwest battleground states of Ohio, Indiana, and especially Pennsylvania, where’s he gone all-in to beat Barack Obama as other states have fallen out of reach. The Amish have an estimated 231,000 members conveniently concentrated in those three states—there are more than 50,000 Amish in Pennsylvania alone and slightly more in Ohio. McCain and Sarah Palin are coming to Lancaster, Pa., on Tuesday.
Amish voters, when they do take to the polls, are believed to be nearly 100 percent Republican because of their pro-life sentiments. There is no edict preventing individuals from voting, and George W. Bush aggressively courted Amish support in 2004 as part of a broader push to woo religious voters. In addition to assigning thousands of volunteers to Lancaster County, Pa., which has one of the largest Amish communities in the country, Bush took time at a campaign stop to approach Amish residents and answer questions about himself.
Peter Mast, 48, an Old Order Amish, could not remember the Democratic nominee’s name. He is not planning to vote and few of his colleagues wished to discuss the election.
“One gentlemen asked him, ‘How do you do this job?’ and President Bush said he prays a lot,” said Katherine Wood Jacobs, a Republican committeewoman for Paradise Township, Pa. “Something like that is an important answer to them. After that they got more invigorated, more interested in registering. I had Amish neighbors asking me for forms in order to vote.”
Though there is little hard data from 2004. The Amish may have given Bush as many as several thousand votes; Bush lost Pennsylvania to John Kerry by just over two percentage points.
If he’s going to win over the Amish bloc, McCain will have some work to do. In Gambier, Ohio, where a large community of Old Order Amish resides, Amish interest in the campaign is minimal despite the area’s prominence in the election. A block from the Kenyon College campus, now papered with literature inviting students to call in for an upcoming phone conference with Obama, Peter Mast, 48, an Old Order Amish, could not remember the Democratic nominee’s name. He is not planning to vote and few of his colleagues wished to discuss the election. Female members would silently point to their husbands when asked their opinion on the campaign (or anything else).
“We just pray to God that he puts the right man in office for our own good,” Mast told me. “We can only try to put up with His president.”
Mast could not recall whom Bush defeated in 2000 or which party is currently in power in Canada, where he was born and raised.
Ruth Irene Garrett, 34, a former member of an Amish township in Iowa, said that while she knew Ronald Reagan was the president when she was growing up, she never knew his opponent in 1984 or any of either man’s policies. “I never even heard the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem until after I left,” Garrett said. “[The Amish] are completely cut off from the outside world.”
Democratic officials in Lancaster County are convinced that the “Bush effect” is a one-time fluke. “We don’t see the same kind of excitement there with McCain,” said Jane Shull, a media relations coordinator for the Lancaster County Democratic Committee. She added that increased opposition to the Iraq war among the pacifist Amish has helped temper their enthusiasm for politics since the last election.
Should McCain fail to win Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana by small margins, his biggest mistake may have been going after the Amish too late: Registration deadlines have passed in all three states. Thanks to Bush’s success in expanding voter rolls in 2004, however, he may already have a significant, if unknown, number of registered voters with which to work. In a race in which McCain has bent over backward in recent weeks to distance himself from Bush, he may lose the election by failing to learn one practical lesson from the president: A vote’s a vote, even if it comes from a man in a buggy.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
What's Joe's Problem?
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Geithner's Stock Plummeting
Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
Sarah Palin, Creationist?
Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
10 Palin Hits the Leakers Missed
Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
Samuel P. Jacobs is a staff reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and The New Republic Online.
The Man Who Beat Glenn Beck
Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.
I think the writer has proven a point though not the one intended. The Amish are American by geography not allegiance. First and foremost, they are Amish. I remember an interview immediately after 9/11, The Amish man interviewed said; "it's all terrible and sad, but it doesn't have anything to do with me." I would think that once you formulate a thesis and then the evidence calls it entirely into question, you would abandon it for a better one like "Amish No Threat to Obama" in PA/OH.
Hilarious. The Amish will save John McCain from his 10 point deficit in Pennsylvania? Amish will vote for the vixen Sarah Palin? Not gonna happen. I doubt there are 50,000 Old Order Amish in the entire state, Barack Obama gets double that number of people at his rallies in Philadelphia.
Perfect. The Republicans now count on a group of people who never see the news and take no interest in current affairs. And.. the Amish have made some depressing choices regarding life beyond human life. I am speaking of the ungoing Amish puppy-mill scandal in both Ohio and Penn. While the Amish have always been fine stewards of farm animals, they seem to have nothing but contempt for the lap dogs they raise in deplorable conditions for the "English" trade. I urge you to do an internet search on this subject.
I feel spurred to give my perspective after reading Tulku2's comment,
"the Amish have always been fine stewards of farm animals"
As with any community, there are individual differences among Amish as to how one decides how to treat their animals. Living alongside Amish, I can state from experience that there are certainly those who "break" their horses in, which I consider far from fine stewardship.
From what I've seen (though there are always exceptions), I don't think that Amish culture really cares for the "lapdog" in the manner that general American society does. I've very rarely ever seen an Amish household own a dog whose main talent is companionship. I think the actions of the few Amish who run those puppy mills is in part because Amish culture rarely views animals as pets. Amish are naturally finer stewards of their farm animals than the majority of the beef industry and the like -- but of course, there's far less purpose (both pratically and ethically) for an Amish farmer to ignore animal health concerns in order to increase profit. A very important cultural difference between Amish and mainstream society is that Amish generally own an animal for its work. As for those rare animals that are more so for pleasure (a riding horse instead of a carriage horse, for example), they are probably trained more gently.
Unfortunately for you they are pacifists, which works against McCain's warmongering themes. In other words, they truly are "pro-life" - it's not just a bumper sticker on their carriages.
I live in rural Ohio. In a county which happens to have the largest population of Amish in Ohio. In the last election our county voted 70% in favor of Bush. The total population is approximately 40,000. The Amish population of Holmes County is about 19,000. Of the 18,196 registered voters it is estimated that there are about 6,000 registered Amish voters. Unofficially, the Holmes County Board of Elections would estimate that there was a 37% increase in Amish voters turnout for the 2004 Presidential election. An increase which should be credited to the free buses, which were organized by the GOP to pick up the Amish at their churches and take them to the polls to cast their vote for George Bush.
In 2004, State Rep. Tim Grendell (Republican) inserted a provision in a jury bill to exempt Amish voters from having to serve jury duty. Since the Amish do not drive, they do not get chosen for jury duty through being on the licensed drivers list and State Rep. Grendell believed that the only reason more Amish were not registering to vote was because they did not want to be selected for jury duty (like driving, publicly judging others is against their faith). He should know since during the 2004 Presidential campaign, the Ohio Republican Party organized people all over the state to visit the Amish in their homes and at their places of business to get them to register to vote. Only to be discouraged at the number of new voters (at the close of the 2004 Presidential election there were 6,000 eligible, but unregistered, Amish voters in Holmes County alone) because of the "jury duty" clause.
Now that the Amish are exempt from jury duty, the GOP has been able to register thousands of new Amish voters throughout the state of Ohio. And, since there is literally only one issue that the Amish care about, Pro-life, and with gentle prompting from the literally thousands of volunteer GOP voter registration reps (who also promises each registered voter a FREE RIDE to the polls on election day), it is certain that every Amish vote is a Republican vote.
I'm not aware of any other state who has changed their state law to specifically benefit a political party (especially the Democratic party) during the election process. No matter how unlikely it seems, especially to people who have not lived among the Amish for 40 years, both George Bush and McCain have spent a considerable time courting the Amish vote. While they may not vote for the "vixen Sarah Palin", they will vote for the conservative Christian and mother of a special needs child (more than half the areas severe cases of mental and physical retardation are Amish) and most importantly, her pro-life stance.
As someone who interviews farmers for the USDA in a largely Amish/Mennonite area, I find it highly unlikely that they will participate in any signifigant number in a government program, including voting in a Presidential election. BTW there is a mixed race Old Order Amish family in our area (really!). I don't know how it happened but I see grandad in the buggy with two mixed race grandsons (suspenders & all) at the store occasionally.
Keep-sweet writes "I doubt there are 50,000 Old Order Amish in the entire state".
You're myopic, sir. There are 40,000 in Lancaster County alone, plenty more in adjoining counties.
He also writes that "Barack Obama gets double that number of people at his rallies in Philadelphia"
But how many people of those people were actually from Philadelphia? A rally in Lancaster that got 10,000 four years ago had less than 1,000 this year, because it was held that same day; everyone drove to Philly because Bruce Springsteen would be there.
Iamadog (I thought on the internet, nobody was able to tell?) wrote "I remember an interview immediately after 9/11, The Amish man interviewed said; "it's all terrible and sad, but it doesn't have anything to do with me.""
I was in a hardware store in New Holland, with a crowd watching the towers fall on a TV display. Everybody gasped.
A few minutes later, when they announced that a plane had crashed in a field in Somerset County, the gasps were much louder. No pictures, just words, and the only victims were the passengers and perhaps a cow, but instead of New York, this was a place they could identify with. Rural Pennsylvania should be immune to all the ugly horrors of New York City or Philadelphia.
And then came Nickel Mines.
Give the Plain Sects a good reason to turn out, and they will turn out - but nobody's been asking them for their vote this year.
McCain, however, hasn't met with them. You can't reach the Plain Sects well with YouTube, with television, with radio or with newspaper,
Dubya made the effort to meet with them in person. He told them that he was chosen by God to carry out a very special mission, and they believed him. Without that, I look for a low turnout among the Plain Sects.
Wow, how low will Bush and McCain go? Two more unChristian men are hard to imagine. I imagine that if the Amish who did vote for Bush were to find that he engaged this country in war, it would be all over.
I have a hard time with the Pro-Life stance that most people tend to take and maybe the Amish are the same. To most people, this means only the baby in the womb? Does a life lose its sacredness as gets older. How can we justify the number of people who die because of wars. I think their stance on wars is that this is one of those things that is of no concern to them; it's just the "Way of the English!"
So where exactly is a line drawn that makes a life no longer important or sacred? Where does the Pro-life end?
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.