FILE - Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives at Ohel Chabad-Lubavitch to visit the gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
November 22, 2024 - 5:13 AM
A social-media tribute to Coptic Christians. A billboard in Amish country. A visit to a revered Jewish gravesite.
While Donald Trump's lock on the white evangelical vote is legendary, he and his campaign allies also wooed smaller religious groups, far from the mainstream.
As it turned out, Trump won by decisive margins, but his campaign aggressively courted niche communities with the understanding that every vote could be critical, particularly in swing states.
Voter surveys such as exit polls, which canvass broad swaths of the electorate, aren’t able to gauge the impact of such microtargeting, but some backers say the effort was worth it.
Just one week before the election, Trump directed a post on the social-media platform X to Coptic Christians in the United States —- whose church has ancient roots in Egypt. He saluted their “Steadfast Faith in God, Perseverance through Centuries of Persecution and Love for this Great Country.”
“This was the first time seeing a major U.S. presidential candidate address the community in this manner,” said Mariam Wahba, a Coptic Christian and research analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based research institute. “It was really a profound moment.”
She said many Copts share the conservative social views of other Christian groups in the Republican constituency, and they may already have been Trump supporters. But the posting reinforced those bonds. Coptic bishops sent the president-elect congratulations after his victory and cited their “shared social and family values.”
Some Assyrian Christians — another faith group with Middle Eastern roots — similarly bonded with Trump, whose mispronunciation of “Assyrian” at a rally created a viral video moment and drew attention to their support.
Sam Darmo, a Phoenix real estate agent and co-founder of Assyrians for Trump, said many community members cited the economy, illegal immigration and other prominent voter issues. They echoed other conservative Christians' concerns, he said, on issues such as abortion, gender identity and religious expression in public. But he said Trump supported various Middle Eastern Christians recovering from the Islamic State group's oppressive rule.
Darmo also credited Massad Boulos, father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, for mobilizing various Middle Eastern Christian groups, including Chaldean Catholics, and other voters, particularly in Michigan, such as Muslims.
“He brought all these minority groups together," he said. “We’re hoping to continue that relationship.”
But members of Middle Eastern-rooted Christian groups, and their politics, are far from monolithic, said Marcus Zacharia, founder of Progressive Copts, a program of Informed Immigrants, an organization that promotes dialogue on sensitive topics among such groups in the United States and Canada.
He said many younger community members question Trump's stances on issues such as immigration, and sense that conservatives sometimes tokenize them by focusing on the plight of persecuted Christians in the Middle East while neglecting wider issues of repression in countries there that the U.S. supports.
He said there needs to be more informed dialogue across the political divide in these communities. “There is no more high time than these next four years to have that way of conducting conversations,” he said.
Courting the Amish
Republicans also made an aggressive push for Amish voters, particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where they are most numerous at about 92,000 (many below voting age).
The GOP has made similar efforts in the past, even though researchers have found that less than 10% of them typically vote, due to their separatism from society. But Republicans used billboards, mailers, ads and door-to-door campaigner to drive turnout in Lancaster County, home base to the nation’s largest Amish settlement.
On Election Day, Amish voters Samuel Stoltzfus and his wife Lillian Stoltzfus said they were supporting Trump, citing their anti-abortion beliefs.
“We basically look at it as murder,” Stoltzfus, 31, said outside a polling center in the Lancaster County community of New Holland, where dozens of other members of the local Amish community voted. Trump has wavered on the issue, dismaying some abortion opponents, though many have said Republicans still align more closely to their views.
Stolzfus added: “Make America great again and keep the moral values,” he said. “Let’s go back to the roots.”
Steven Nolt, a history professor at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster College who studies the Amish and their voting patterns, said that while it’s too early to say definitively without further research, he doesn’t see evidence of a larger turnout this year.
Lancaster County as a whole — most of which is not Amish — is a GOP stronghold that Trump won handily, though both parties’ votes edged up from 2020, according to unofficial results posted by the Pennsylvania Department of State.
Trump’s biggest increases were in urban or suburban areas with few Amish, while some areas with larger Amish populations generally saw a modest increase in the Trump vote, said Nolt, director of the college’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
“Bottom line, percentage-wise, not much change in the parts of Lancaster County where the Amish live,” he said.
Paying respects at a Chabad grave
Trump directly reached out to members of the Chabad Lubavitch movement, a prominent and highly observant branch of Orthodox Judaism.
On Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, Trump made a symbolically resonant visit to the “Ohel,” the burial site of the movement’s revered late leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.
Wearing a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish skullcap, Trump, who has Jewish family members, brought a written prayer to the Ohel and laid a small stone at the grave in keeping with tradition. The site in New York City, while particularly central to Chabad adherents, draws an array of Jewish and other visitors, including politicians.
About two-thirds of Jewish voters overall supported Trump's opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters. But the Trump campaign has made a particular outreach to Orthodox Jews, citing issues including his policies toward Israel in his first administration.
Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowitz of Chabad Lubavitch of Southwest Florida said it was moving for him to see images of Trump's visit.
“The mere fact that he made a huge effort, obviously it was important to him,” he said.
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Associated Press journalist Luis Henao contributed.
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