Michael Munger

At Duke, Munger says he works "across the aisles – there aren't a lot of other Libertarians there."

Following the election, Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine wrote: "I humbly submit that Duke University political science professor Michael Munger, who ran a strong bid as a Libertarian Party candidate for governor in North Carolina, set his eyes toward an even bigger and remote target in 2012, that stationary Death Star known as the White House."

In 2011, Munger portrayed a security guard at the beginning of a video titled "Fight of the Century", featuring a rap battle between actors portraying economists John Meynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, discussing the effects of government spending on the economy. As of December 2017, the video has amassed over 3.8 million views.

Feeling that North Carolina voters needed an alternative to the two party duopoly, Munger ran as a Libertarian candidate for Governor of North Carolina in 2008. Early in the year, Munger said that Democratic gubernatorial challenger Bev Perdue was a "Stepford Wife" and the Republican nominees were "circus clowns." Prior to May 2008, the North Carolina Libertarian Party and Munger gathered 100,000 signatures of voters in order to qualify to appear on North Carolina's ballot. They, along with the Green Party, sued the state unsuccessfully over the ballot access rules. Munger appeared as an expert witness in other cases on behalf of the Green Party and the ACLU.

Munger appeared as one of two keynote speakers at the national Libertarian convention in Denver in May 2008. He later made history as the first third-party candidate to participate in a live, televised gubernatorial debate in North Carolina.

Munger has worked as a staff economist for the Federal Trade Commission and taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin, and UNC-Chapel Hill before becoming a political science professor at Duke University in 1997. In 2000, he became the head of Duke's political science department. His research centers around elections and campaign finance.

Munger earned a B.A. in economics at Davidson College (1980), an M.A. in economics at Washington University in St. Louis (1982), and a Ph.D. in economics at Washington University (1984) for thesis titled Institutions and Outcomes: Two Essays on the Importance of Legislative Structure for Understanding Public Policy. He is a past president of the Public Choice Society and (since 2013) a co-editor of The Independent Review. He has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics and has had books published with the Cambridge University Press and the University of Michigan Press. Since March 2012 he has been a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College. He also serves as an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute and as a member of the Academic Council of the Jack Miller Center.

Michael Curtis "Mike" Munger (/ˈ m ʌ n ɡ ər / ; born September 23, 1958) is an economist and a former chair of the political science department at Duke University, where he continues to teach political science, public policy, and economics. He is a prolific writer, and his book Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practices is now a standard work in the field of policy analysis. In 2008 he was the Libertarian candidate for Governor of North Carolina.