This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 4th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

On a day like today, it may seem like tough times for libertarians, wars with no end in sight,

spiraling debt, the nation's first president who is also a member of the

W. W. W.E. Hall of Fame. And you may have heard that there are simply no libertarians at all in

the electorate. But don't question your own existence just yet.

Emily Eekins explains why. Jonathan Chate writes about the Democracy Fund, Voter, Study Group and posts a scatter plot underneath a subhead,

libertarians don't exist. And of course he's looking through the 2016 election. You see very large cluster of folks voting for Hillary Clinton, a large cluster of folks voting for Donald Trump,

and relatively few of them falling into the quadrant that we could reasonably call

Libertarian.

Yeah, so the piece that you're describing by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine was kind of making the rounds on social media this week and what people were really shocked to find is that according to this analysis that he cites

that 45% of Americans fall into the socially liberal and economically

liberal camp and only 3.8% fell into the socially

liberal fiscally conservative camp which people often you know associate with

libertarians and the people were just so shocked.

And when I saw this, I thought, wow, that's really different

than almost any other, you know, academic research

I've ever seen on the topic about how many libertarians are there in the electorate,

how many liberals, how many conservatives, and that's the other group, the one that we haven't talked

about as much is you might call on the populists or the

communitarians. They're folks that kind of like big government in the

economic realm but are more kind of culturally conservative. And so I decided to write a piece for Cato at Liberty just outlining what the academic literature

says about how many libertarians there are in the electorate.

...