Amish For Trump?

Those of you who attended well-known colleges and universities - University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Notre Dame, Harvard, Ole Miss, for instance - have no idea what it’s like for those of us who graduated from lesser-known institutions.

I have a Google alert set for my alma mater - Elizabethtown College - and it rarely goes off.

When it does, it can mean just one thing: The Amish are making news again.

The small, private college I attended is located in bucolic Lancaster Country, home to most of Pennsylvania’s 75,000 Amish folks. As a result, the school’s Amish scholars are world famous.

In fact, Elizabethtown has become something of a dial-an-Amish-expert destination for members of the media trying to understand this reclusive, rural religious sect.

When an Elizabethtown College alert popped up recently, I quickly checked and saw a piece from The Washington Post.

Naturally, it concerned the Amish. This piece made me laugh.

No matter which side of the political divide you’re on, surely you can see the humor - or at least the irony - in the Trump campaign’s Amish outreach.

Yep, according to The Post, Republicans are hoping to capture Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes again in part with the support of peaceful people who make their own clothes and almost never vote.

While working hard for every vote is smart - and part of what elected Trump in 2016 - trying to convince Amish voters to jump into their buggies head to the polls next year to help elect a thrice-married New York billionaire seems a little far-fetched.

Yet, the Trump campaign had an Amish initiative in 2016 and plans another for 2020. Like last time, the campaign will stress issues like “religious liberty, business regulation, abortion and judges,” which the Amish care about deeply.

The Post found Kyle Kopko and Steven Nolt, two of Elizabethtown’s “foremost experts on the Amish” to fill them in.  The scholars expressed skepticism that Trump would inspire an Amish stampede to the polls, although they acknowledged that the 1,019 votes cast by community members in 2016 were probably due in part to the Amish PAC’s presence.

Still, that was a small percentage of Lancaster County’s 15,055 eligible Amish voters.

While the experts said that 90 percent of Amish voters register as Republican and less than 1 percent register as Democrats, on the whole they simply shun the worldly concerns of government and politics.

That may be changing, however. Mostly among the Amish who have contact with outsiders. Like Ike Lapp.

“Ike Lapp...is the rare Amish man with plenty of political opinions. His neighbor Bob, who is not Amish, frequently drives him from place to place. And Bob watches Fox News, and fills Lapp in on what is happening.

“Lapp says of Trump: ‘I think he does more of what he says than a lot of the presidents ever did. If he says it, he means it. . . .He’s pretty rash, but I think that’s what we need as a leader....’

“He’s (Lapp) thinking of registering to vote for the first time. In 2020, he might cast the first ballot of his life, for Trump.”

The Amish PAC hasn’t yet kicked into high gear, but according to The Post, the group used billboards last time and will do the same for 2020.

The 2016 boards were emblazoned with “VOTE TRUMP’ and featured an Amish buggy and “Hard Working, Pro-Life, Family Dedicated . . . Just Like YOU.” 

Think about it. The president, who had gilded toilets in his swanky Manhattan penthouse, is claiming an affinity with plain people who only recently began to use buttons.

Clearly the campaign’s banking on a lot of Ike Lapps.