Central Chester Today

To the Harris/Walz campaign, Bob “Farmer Bob” Lange was a special gift: A lifelong Republican, Pennsylvania township supervisor and Trump voter in the previous two elections, Lange made it known that he would be voting for Kamala Harris for president.

The Harris campaign jumped on Lange switching sides, and filmed the fifth-generation farmer and his wife Kristina Chadwick Lange on their Chester County farm, Sugartown Strawberries, where they cited January 6 and Trump’s handling of the pandemic as the reasons they were voting for the Democrats.

Backlash against Lange and Chadwick exploded when “Bad Hombre” recently posted on X, that the two were “trained actors, film producers, and farmers who recently debuted a film called 'Hayride to Hell' at the far-left CentreFilm Festival in State College, PA in 2023 which featured films about interracial gay fathers who find themselves raising a child after one of the dad's becomes a widower, and another about the struggle of illegal immigrants.”

Lange did not respond to a request from Central Chester Today to comment on the “Bad Hombre” post, and whether he and his wife were paid to appear in the spot for the Harris campaign.

The post also cited Federal Election Commission records, linking the two as long-time contributors to ActBlue, a Democratic Political Action Committee. However, Lange said in a SAVVY MAINLINE story that Bad Hombre confused him with a Philadelphia-area Democrat and "mega-donor" Robert Lange. 

For the SAVVY story, the two said they did write the script for Hayride to Hell, a B horror movie filmed at their farm, in which they played monsters with no dialogue. The money earned from the movie would help stave off development of their farm, they said.

The Harris campaign ad, according to Radio+Television Business Reports, will run on rural radio stations across Pennsylvania. It’s expected to reach 500,000 potential voters in rural areas – traditionally Republican areas in Pennsylvania.

Except that rural Chester County, bordering Philadelphia to the west, is hardly representative of other rural areas in Pennsylvania. According to the Philadelphia Encyclopedia, Chester County is one of the wealthiest counties in Pennsylvania, and one of the most expensive areas in the state to live.

The per capita income in the county in 2020 was $92,175 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, while the Center for Rural Pennsylvania puts the average per capita rural areas in the state at $50,615 in 2020. As of 2021, the poverty rate in rural Pennsylvania was 12.9 percent, according to the Rural Health Information Hub.

The winner of Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, is favored to win the presidency, and the latest polling has Trump and Harris deadlocked in the state.

The Chester County GOP, the Pennsylvania GOP and the Republican National Committee did not return calls for comment on the Langes.