Amish for Trump
There are generally two opinions about raw milk. The vast majority of people find it strange that a person would ever want to drink the fluid that comes out of a cow’s udder without first cooking it to get rid of any potential harmful bacteria. On the other hand, a small but steadily growing minority of people respond that milk should be drunk the way God made it: unpasteurized and unhomogenized.
I’m not here to weigh in on this rather contentious debate. I’m not a scientist, nor do I want to spend hours pouring over scientific studies I barely understand to provide you with the answer. I’m also biased. I’ve been drinking raw milk since I was a kid, and it’s never gotten me sick. That said, by all accounts Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture might have had good reasons for obtaining an administrative search warrant to look into exactly what was going on at Amos Miller’s farm back in January.
Amos Miller is an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, and he’d been in trouble with the law before for selling raw milk. The FDA currently prohibits the sale of raw milk across state lines, and Pennsylvania requires farmers to acquire a permit to sell within the state. Miller lacked the permit (he argued he didn’t need it since he was selling to a “private membership association”), and his milk was traced back to cases of illness in children living in Michigan and New York.
However, when the Department of Agriculture raided his farm earlier this year, it didn’t make the Amish happy. It was, by all accounts, a last-straw kind of situation. The Amish community, according to Robert Barnes, a lawyer who reached out to them to try to gain votes for Trump, already felt harassed by both the government and the state of Pennsylvania, so when Miller’s farm got raided, they were ready to take action.
What exactly that action would be became clear when Donald Trump Jr. waded into the debate. “Imagine what law enforcement could accomplish if they went after oh I don’t know, say, members of elite pedophile rings rather than farmers selling to their neighbours???” he tweeted.
The result? On Tuesday, the New York Post reported, according to an anonymous source, that horses and buggies showed up in “unprecedented numbers” at polling stations so that the Amish could cast their vote for Donald Trump — this, even though in the past, most Amish have chosen not to vote for religious reasons.
Ultimately, the whole raw milk thing probably didn’t do much to swing Pennsylvania in Trump’s favor. According to incomplete numbers published by the AP on Thursday, he won the state by more than 100,000 votes. That said, the Amish vote likely didn’t account for much of that. While 92,000 Amish live in Pennsylvania, more than half of them are minors. In 2020, it’s estimated that just 3,000 Amish voted in the state.
Not only did Trump galvanize the Amish community in Pennsylvania, he was able to gain more support from black voters, especially black male voters. He made “mammoth” gains among Hispanic voters, according to the BBC, enjoying a 14-percentage-point bump since the 2020 election. His appeal to rural voters worked phenomenally well (something even the women at The View had to concede), as did his appeal to the working class, to men, to non-college educated Americans, and — much to the chagrin of MSNBC’s Joy Reid — to white women.
He didn’t just appeal to those demographics, he turned them into allies against the elites who were too caught up in their own ideology to recognize that what Americans don’t want is the government dictating everything from what they think about the economy to the milk they drink.
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