Amish May Actually Vote This Cycle d/t Government Interference With Their Milk Sales in PA

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For decades, the Amish have declined to vote – that could all change (and it’s because of milk)
It is not inconceivable that thousands of Amish votes could turn Pennsylvania red – and one man is on a mission to make it happen
by Robert Mendick
Chief Reporter, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
15 October 2024

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”

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