From the May/Jun, 2026 issue of *Touchstone*

Quodlibet

The Amish Vote

by J. Douglas Johnson

When Elon Musk received word in the run-up to the 2024 election that the Pennsylvania Amish had registered to vote in record numbers, he posted on X: “The Amish may very well save America! Thank goodness for them. And let’s keep the government out of their lives.”

According to recently published research by Steven Nolt and Kyle Kopko of Elizabethtown College, the Amish vote did not in fact make the difference in Pennsylvania, with only a little over three thousand Old Order Amish turning out to vote for President Trump in a state he won by 120,000 votes.

Since the Old Order Amish vote Republican or not at all, and since their population doubles about every twenty years, many Republicans hope the Amish will become more politically engaged in this key battleground state. But so far, thank God, they haven’t.

We have sort of been through all this before. In the early part of the last century, few women showed much interest in politics even after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. At that time, the feelings of most women towards suffragettes ranged from indifference to outright hostility. Similar to the Amish of today, the anti-suffragettes (or antis, as they were known) thought gaining the right to vote would lead to the politicization of everything. The antis rightly feared that the political arena, and the homogenization of separate male and female realms, threatened to intrude upon their almost exclusive domain over home life, the family budget, the education of children, and so on.

And indeed, the antis have been vindicated beyond anyone’s imagination now that even the biological understanding of what it means to be a woman has been thrown into question by the politicization of everything.

By staying out of the political arena, the Amish have managed to protect themselves from endless debates over questions that would have seemed absurd to all Americans less than a century ago. And so long as they remain apolitical, they provide a powerful witness that they otherwise never could.

Consider, for example, that neither pro-lifers nor abortion-rights advocates canvass voters in Amish country. Why not? Because it would prove no less ridiculous to explain to Old Order Amish families why they shouldn’t kill their children as it would to explain why they should. If the day ever comes that the Amish appear open to being convinced on this or any other political front, it would not only signal the end of the Amish community but the final ruin of the once great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well.

J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.

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