This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 22nd, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Polster John Zogby says there just aren't that many libertarians out there, and he's got some numbers to help

him make his case.

David Bowes, Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute and co-author of the Cato Paper,

The Libertarian Vote in the age of Obama response.

I'm glad to have a leading pollster talking about this even if he's challenging our

argument because one of the things that we wanted to accomplish about this

even if he's challenging our argument because one of the things that we wanted to accomplish with our first study in 2006

and the subsequent updates that we've done to this work on the Libertarian vote

is to get people talking about is there a

libertarian vote how big is it is it something political candidates and

consultants ought to be interested in so I'm glad to have Zog be writing about it, adding some new data that we didn't already have.

That's a good thing.

The big problem with what I saw in his article is that he asks people to describe themselves ideologically and he

finds it only a very small number 2% say they're libertarian. Well we know that.

What we've been arguing in the Libertarian vote is that there are a lot more people who hold broadly

libertarian views, which you could call fiscally conservative and socially liberal, or you could say,

well, there are people who want the government

out of their economic lives and they're not interested in social issues.

There are different ways to describe it.

But somehow, people who don't fall into the red team conservative box or the blue team liberal

box and whose differences with those two boxes fall in a libertarian direction.

...