Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, was considered the swing state upon which the 2024 election would hinge. In the end, Donald Trump looks set to sweep all of them in what was a decisive victory nationally. In his third try for the US presidency he managed to get a majority in the popular and the Electoral College vote for the first time.

In the Keystone State he garnered over 50% of the vote and surpassed Biden’s 2020 winning margin, currently in excess of 130,000. Netizens and Trump supporters are praising Scott Presler for swinging Pennsylvania back into the ‘Red’ through his get-out-the-vote efforts in the state over the past few years, especially in the Amish community.

The story of Scott Presler

Presler has been a conservative political activist since 2016 when he served as a regional field director for the Republican Party of Virginia. He is openly gay and was a co-founder of the LGBTQ coalition ‘Gays for Trump’ that same year.

He became a volunteer for ‘ACT for America’, and anti-Muslim advocacy group, the following year. He helped organize ‘March Against Sharia’ events. Additionally, he’s organized urban cleanup events in Baltimore and Los Angeles where scores of volunteers removed trash from the streets.

After the 2020 election he participated in ‘Stop the Steal’ protests challenging the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. He has also helped spread a wide range of conspiracy theories, including those involving QAnon.

The conservative influencer has built up an online following of almost 2 million on his X account under the banner ‘ThePersistence’ where he states “I helped defeat Hillary, Kamala, & organized the Baltimore cleanup. We delivered Pennsylvania for President Trump.”

How the activist galvanized the Amish community’s vote for Donald Trump in US Election 2024

In 2021, Presler settled in Pennsylvania where he has been working to get voters registered and encouraged them to support Trump. He targeted labor unions, hunters and specifically Amish communities.

For this last group he used the case of a local farmer whose dairy was raided by state authorities for selling raw milk, unpasteurized, without a permit as an example of government overreach. He also focused on the Republican Party’s stance on religious and education freedom along with deregulation of business.

There have been social media posts crediting him with registering 180,000 Amish voters in Lancaster alone. That would be pulling a rabbit out of the hat as there are less than 93,000 Amish of all ages in Pennsylvania, and about half of them are too young to be eligible to vote.

Proving just how effective his get out the vote efforts were will also be an arduous task requiring painstaking research. Steven Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, told WHYY that only a handful of Amish vote, typically less than 10% of them.