HIS horse and buggy safely tethered, straw hat perched on his head and plain dark suit brushed as neatly as his long beard, Dan Stoltz, an Amish builder, watched in quiet awe yesterday as his hero, George W. Bush, emerged from Air Force One to greet the roars of the crowd.

“We’re voting for Bush. We like his values,” Mr Stoltz declared. And as Mr Bush looked down to see not just baseball caps, but clusters of white bonnets, boaters and trademark beards, he knew beyond doubt that this year the Amish have hitched their buggies to his re-election bid and are coming out to vote.

Mr Bush landed in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, among its rolling fields and unmechanised farms, aware that if just a few thousand vote for him here and in the neighbouring battleground state of Ohio, this deeply conservative community that shuns modern life might just deliver him another four years in the White House.

Although pacifists, the 52,000 Amish in Pennsylvania, and 55,000 in Ohio, are natural Republicans, even more obsessed by cultural issues of abortion and gay marriage than matters of war and peace.

“An Amish vote is a Republican vote. And if we don’t vote, we pray Republican,” said Chet Beiler, a former Amish and now Republican activist who has been dropping off registration forms in Lancaster County’s Amish farms and shops. Already 2,000 have signed up and promised to ride their buggies to the polling booths on Tuesday.

Mr Beiler has been working with the Bush campaign, which has aggressively courted the Amish vote all year. Campaign workers are even offering to drive them to the polls. But reaching out to a community that does not watch television, drive cars or have telephones in their houses (some have answer phones in their barns), has not been easy. So on July 9, Mr Bush came to Lancaster for a private meeting with 30 Amish.

“They loved Bush,” Mr Beiler said. “He’s anti-abortion. He’s against gay marriage. He’s pro-faith. He’s plain spoken, as many of them tend to be. And we recognised that this year, the Amish are excited enough about President Bush to register in large numbers and in a swing state this close, it could make all the difference.”

Mr Bush usually campaigns in open-neck shirts, but yesterday he took to stage next to his wife, besuited and immaculate. Thirty yards away, Sam Stoltfus, 60, an Amish farmer who began the journey on his buggy to Lancaster’s airport at 4.30 am, looked on in delight.

“We are sort of swept up in Bush fever,” he said. “You could hold up a dead mouse with a sign ‘I love Bush’ and we’d still probably think twice about stomping that mouse underfoot.” In Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, and Holmes County in Ohio, election boards have seen a surge in Amish names among those registering to vote.

“A lot will vote this year,” Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, said. “I’m expecting about 20 per cent to turn out for Bush, or about 3,000 votes. And remember, because they don’t have telephones, they have been completely under the radar for the pollsters. If Ohio, particularly, is as close as Florida in 2000, they could make all the difference.

This is a very unusual year, and it’s very unusual to see all this activity.”

The Amish are not natural political animals. They are deeply reserved Christians, descendants of Swiss Germans who settled in Lancaster and Holmes Counties in the early 1700s as part of William Penn’s “holy experiment” in religious tolerance.

And not all are comfortable with voting. Many want to maintain their seclusion from modern life and are concerned that if their profile is raised, the privileges that let them maintain their way of life, including an exemption from paying taxes, will be threatened. Many elders are cautioning against getting involved in the election.

But when the Amish feel that their core values threatened — and they see John Kerry as a threat — they are willing to emerge from seclusion. They came out in large numbers in 1952 to vote for Dwight Eisenhower against the Unitarian Adlai Stevenson, and again in 1960 to vote against the Roman Catholic John F Kennedy. Mr Bush’s decision to invade Iraq also does not sit comfortably, but social issues trump everything.

“I don’t agree with war at all,” John Fisher, an Amish welder and father of seven in Lancaster, said. But he added that Mr Bush’s “focus on the family” will win his vote.

As President Bush roared into the autumn sky and on to a rally in Ohio, the Amish untethered their horses and slowly guided their buggies through the enormous post-rally traffic jam, and back to their farms. But next week, many will be back out again for their President.

A SIMPLE LIFE

Women wear dresses of one colour, a white apron, and black bonnets. The dresses have no buttons or fasteners other than pins

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