This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 9th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Did libertarians spoil 2020 for Donald Trump and effectively hand the presidency to Joe Biden.

Many Republicans seem to think so and have taken to social media and the airwaves to air those

grievances.

But as Cato's David Bowes points out, it's still not exactly clear what happened.

In at least four closely contested races for electoral college votes for the president.

The Libertarian candidate Joe Jorgensen exceeded significantly the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

And in those four states that Joe Biden won, some people are saying, hey, the Libertarian quote unquote

spoiled this election that otherwise would have gone to Donald Trump. So how do we begin to evaluate that kind of

claim and and what assumptions go into that claim? Well there's a few things going on there. First, four years ago

about 8 million voters voted for someone other than Trump or Clinton and the

Libertarian Gary Johnson got more than half of that.

This year, it looks like only about 3 million,

2% of the vote did not go to Biden or Trump,

and Jorgensen, again, getting somewhat more than half of that about 1.2% this time.

So there's a there's a body of voters that in a close election both of close elections, could have made the difference.

Now what I found was that on Wednesday morning when Trump was up in the early counts of in-person voting, Democrats

were yelling at libertarians on Twitter saying you jerks kept Trump in office

because it's like they were assuming that the libertarians would have voted for

Biden if they hadn't voted the Libertarian. And then when Biden moved ahead in the

states you're referring to, conservatives on Facebook were complaining that libertarians cost Trump the election.

...