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Can the Libertarian Vote Swing Elections?

So asserts Cato's Vice President David Bose in a study he co-authored with the Executive

Director of America's Future Foundation David Kirby.

In the Libertarian Vote, the authors find that 13% of the electorate is Libertarian and that these

voters are up for grabs in coming elections. David Bowes joins us for today's

podcast. David would you please tell me about your study? The study is really the

first time anybody has taken modern polling data and we use three different sets. We use

data from the Gallup Poll from the Pew Research Center and from the University of

Michigan's American National Election Studies and David Kirby, the-author got the data sets for all of these

polls and ran new tabulations on them and found out how many American voters are

basically libertarian. not libertarian the way Cato Institute

scholars are.

These people haven't necessarily read Ein-Rand or Milton Friedman, but that they lean libertarian

in a way that makes them different from liberals and

conservatives and what we found and what I think surprises a lot of people is

that 13 or 14 or 15 percent of the electorate is libertarian in a way that's different from liberals and

conservatives and then what we found and this surprised even me was that

libertarians have typically voted Republican in most races that we can identify

and we understand why that is taxes regulation government spending that's what

...