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US presidential election: did the Amish really swing the vote for Trump in Pennsylvania?

The image was striking during the American election on Tuesday: a caravan of horse-drawn carriages filled with members of the Amish community heading to the polling stations in Pennsylvania, one of the most emblematic “swing states” of the race. the American presidency. Should we see this as a reason for Donald Trump’s victory in this state? The Republican candidate came in first with more than 100,000 votes in advance, winning his 19 electors.

On social networks, some Internet users broadcast images of a flood of Amish leaving the polling stations.

These publications appeared after a rumor around a very large number of Amish having registered as Republicans on the electoral lists rustled on Instagram, a few days before the vote. She even was picked up by the New York Post on election day. “Republicans could benefit from a boost in Pennsylvania thanks to a demographic group rarely seen at the polls,” the newspaper wrote.

On social networks, these messages claimed that more than 200,000 Amish, this traditionalist Christian group from North America, had registered to vote in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. “The Amish have chosen sides after the Kamala Harris administration raided Amos Miller’s organic dairy farm. And this camp is that of freedom, deregulation and Donald Trump ‼️ 2020: 45,000-50,000 Amish registered on the electoral roll. Now in 2024: more than 200,000 registrations on the electoral lists”, claimed a post published on October 24 on Instagram, widely distributed.

US presidential election: did the Amish really swing the vote for Trump in Pennsylvania?
The Instagram post that spread false figures.

The problem is that these figures are completely crazy: the Amish population of Pennsylvania is only around 93,000 people, almost half of whom are minors and therefore obviously do not have the right to vote…

That’s not all: looking closely at the videos that circulated on social networks, it was the name of Mike Pence which was associated with that of Donald Trump on certain flags, proof that these images do not date from 2024, but from 2020. However, some pro-Trump accounts quickly deduced on social networks that Donald Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania was the result of this “tidal wave”.

Pennsylvania is a key jurisdiction because it is considered a “swing state,” meaning there is no candidate with a clear lead in polls heading into the election. The state has 19 of the 270 electors a candidate needs to win the election. In 2020, President Joe Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes, hence these calculations by Trump supporters to explain the “Amish victory”.

“A few thousand” voters

Because in reality, according to statistics from the Amish Studies Department of the Young Center at Elizabethtown College, the Amish population of Pennsylvania is estimated to 92,660 people in 2024. Steven M. Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, told AFP that “it is completely impossible that there are more than 180,000 registered Amish voters in Pennsylvania.”

“The total number of Amish voters in the state could be, at most, a few thousand, not tens of thousands,” he added. He said “about half or a little more than half of the Amish population is under the age of 18,” so the number of eligible Amish in Pennsylvania would be about 45,000 at most. “Only a small percentage of these people are probably registered to vote,” he also noted.

An Amish horse and buggy heads to a polling place at the Leacock Township municipal building in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, on Election Day, November 5, 2024. RYAN COLLERD / AFP
An Amish horse and buggy heads to a polling place at the Leacock Township municipal building in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, on Election Day, November 5, 2024. RYAN COLLERD / AFP AFP or licensors

Steven M. Nolt adds that although there are localities where voting has long been tolerated and practiced by a minority, “many Amish communities in Pennsylvania discourage voting so strongly that it is virtually banned.”

During the vote, we were able to see Amish people voting here and there, but this remained anecdotal and was not decisive in the final result of the vote in Pennsylvania which saw Trump win with nearly 133,000 votes in advance on his Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

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