Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It is not inconceivable that thousands of Amish votes could turn Pennsylvania red – and one man is on a mission to make it happen
Scott Presler, a giant of a man at 6ft 5in tall, his lustrous hair falling in great waves down to his waist, is wearing runners’ shorts showing off his long, tanned legs and what appears to be a smidgen of lipstick. The flamboyant, one-time chairman of Gays for Trump has given himself a new task: to persuade Pennsylvania’s 80,000-strong, strait-laced Amish community to vote for Donald Trump and in doing so, return the former president to the White House. It seems a tall order.
As he does every Friday, Mr Presler is manning his stall at the Green Dragon market, an Amish fair in the heart of Lancaster County, where horses and buggies can be as commonplace as the motorcar.
Stacked up at the stall were dozens of newly printed signs declaring “Amish for Trump” while an elderly couple, distinctive in traditional Amish clothing, approached the stand and signed up for voter registration papers. “My heart just led me to it,” said Edna Stoltzfus, 76, before returning to her own market stall where she sells homemade “canned fruits and vegetables”. Her husband, who declined to give his name, said: “I am concerned about my country,” adding cryptically: “You know why that is.” Both will cast ballots for Trump.
For decades, the Amish have largely declined to vote – one farmer told me they prefer “to put our faith in God” – but this time around may just be different. Angered, if the Amish could ever get angry, by a raid by state authorities on a local farmer selling raw milk, the community appears to be stirring.
In a race as tight as Pennsylvania – where Joe Biden won by 80,000 votes last time – it is not inconceivable that thousands of Amish votes could turn Pennsylvania red.
Mr Presler, 36, is in some ways an unlikely choice to persuade members of a strict, insular Christian sect to turn out to vote for Trump.
He has been embroiled in a sex scandal of his own in the past (he says “show me the proof, show me the proof” on the 2016 allegation made by the website Politico that he had engaged in sexual activity in a Republican Party office in Virginia and then posted pictures on Craigslist prompting him to quit his then job) and accused of stoking racial tensions through his involvement with a “March against Sharia”, organised by an anti-Muslim far-Right group.
NBC has accused him of spreading “a wide range of conspiracies, including about QAnon”.
A confidante of Lara Trump – it is claimed that she tried to hire him for a senior post with the Republican National Committee that she co-chairs – Mr Presler has been crisscrossing Pennsylvania for months signing up voters, clocking up more than 20,000 miles in just a few months. There’s nothing he won’t do to get involved.
“I even milked a cow at an Amish farm by hand,” he says, “An Amish farmer let me milk his cow. I was sitting on the smallest stool known to humanity. As someone who’s 6ft 5, milking a cow amongst all of these other cows it shows you, there’s no secret to what we do – show up, show your heart, ask for a vote, get them registered. And I think that’s why we are so successful.
“Our goal is to meet voters where they are and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a hunter, an Evangelical, an Amish, a veteran. We show up. And I think that’s been missing in the Republican Party for a very long time. We have expected voters to come to us. No, we have to go to the voter.”
His group Early Vote Action will lay on buses in the coming weeks to ferry Amish for early voting at local board of election offices across the State. The organisation, which through colossal donations now employs 60 staff state-wide and dozens more volunteers from as far away as California, has obtained a list of 13,000 addresses of Amish homes, who will receive leaflets and voter registration forms in the coming days.
“I would consider it a success to get anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 Amish, which could very well swing the election.” To put it in perspective in 2020, it’s estimated that just 2,000 to 3,000 Amish voted. Mr Presler’s aides on the ground believe they can recruit 20,000 Amish to their cause, half the eligible vote.
“My goal is to reach out to people that agree with me, get them registered and we win. It’s math … I will say [about] the Amish: I am a long-haired, not extremely masculine male that wears boots when I’m not wearing shorts. And the Amish have been nicer and more welcoming to me than liberal Democrats and I think that speaks volumes to their culture and their hearts.”
Lara Trump – they are close enough that when he texts her, she texts right back – ushered him on stage as one of the warm-up acts prior to her father-in-law’s return to Butler, Pennsylvania, where he had been shot three months ago. She has praised him for “single-handedly” registering “more voters for the Republican Party than any other human being alive today”.
Mr Presler used his two minutes to make an unscripted pitch to among others the Amish. “We will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your school choice, your religious freedom, your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family,” he said, in front of a crowd of tens of thousands while wearing his now trademark shorts.
The appearance attracted a lot of attention and a lot of criticism, including publications dredging up that sex allegation from 2016. “They’re attacking me because we’re effective,” he says, “They’re attacking me because we’re going to help deliver Pennsylvania for Donald J Trump and win the presidency.”
He “welcomes the hate” he has been attracting on social media, he has 1.7 million followers on X, which simply grows his online presence, explaining that “every time they reply to me, even an evil, hateful comment, they put money in my bank account”.
Raw milk, which he alluded to in his Butler speech, is a raw subject. Amos Miller, whose farm was raided back in January for selling unpasteurised milk from his herd of 45 Jersey cows, has become a cause célèbre, unwittingly at the centre of America’s culture wars.
An online fund has raised more than $300,000 to pay Mr Miller’s legal fees and to stave off the threat of foreclosure.
On his pretty as a picture farm in Bird-in-Hand, 10 miles south of the Green Dragon market, Mr Miller, 46, a father of eight and grandfather of two, likens his plight to the jailing of his own grandfather in the 1940s for refusing to send his children to school past 8th grade. Mr Miller will be voting for Trump on Nov 5.
“The election,” he says, “is not a big discussion [in the community]. You can vote at your own choice. They [the religious leaders] don’t discourage it. I am registered to vote.” Asked who he will vote for, Mr Miller smiles. When I ask him if it will be for Trump, he says “yes”. It feels reluctant. “We put our faith in God. We want him to be the leader in the community.”
The farm is off-grid and the only light in the barn used to pack his raw dairy products sold to “members” signed up to purchase his goods (the legal fight is ongoing) is cast by a battery-powered light hung from the ceiling. “I don’t want to get involved in politics. I just want to be a farmer. I want to raise my family on the farm and just try to take care of the earth and God’s creation. There are many members who appreciate what we do but the government wants to come down and interfere with that,” he says.
Federal and state authorities have been trying to compel Mr Miller to follow food safety rules since 2016 while he has declined to apply for a raw milk licence because he doesn’t want his farm subjected to outside inspections. The raid back in January followed reports a child in Michigan and another in New York had become ill from E.Coli poisoning linked to Mr Miller’s milk. He insists there is no proof of that and has been charged with no such offence. Anyway, he says, his products are free of all chemicals. “The food in supermarkets is so highly processed. It’s foreign to the body,” says Mr Miller.
The Amish settled in Pennsylvania in the 18th century to escape religious persecution in Europe and while some members have embraced aspects of modern life more than others, the reality is this remains a community that has shunned many of the technological advancements of the last 300 years. They speak Pennsylvania Dutch amongst themselves and refer to non-Amish Americans as “the English”. For some, even a bicycle is just “too fast”.
They are as understated as Donald Trump is over-blown. It is the oddest fit.
Back at the Green Dragon market, Joe Grady, 49, an Early Vote Action volunteer in charge of the stall, says that “when we talk to Amish folks, the thing they bring up is the Amos Miller case”. He adds: “That is the direct correlation of how government gets involved in your own business.”
Mr Presler had inspired him to volunteer for the first time in his life, giving up his weekends to drum up early registrations, while Becky Martens, 66, has driven 3,000 miles in a camper van across the US from her home in California to sign up for Mr Presler’s campaign. In Pennsylvania since Sept 14, Mrs Martens has to date registered two Amish and a Mennonite but her enthusiasm remains undimmed.
Republicans have made plays for the Amish vote before, notably in 2020 when the first dedicated Amish PAC was incorporated, raising more than $200,000, largely spent on old-fashioned newspaper adverts and roadside billboards. The campaign failed to shift the dial.
This time round Mr Presler’s energy and organisational abilities suggest a sea change. It won’t just be the Amish vote he gets out and he has a list of target groups to go after including Latinos and, truckers and hunters. If he succeeds in delivering Pennsylvania, the Trump family will owe him; a role in Washington beckons.
“If President Trump wants me to even be a janitor at the White House, I would do it,” says Mr Presler, “I would clean the best toilets. I’d be really good at it. But I’m not cutting my hair. The hair has to stay.”