Here’s some good news for libertarian-leaning presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul. According to a new poll from YouGov, a majority of Americans (51 percent) want to shrink the size of government. And a solid one-fifth of likely millennial voters identify as libertarians.

The poll found that 20 percent of Americans ages 18-29 embrace the term “libertarian” when describing their political views, while 39 percent reject the label. Forty-two percent said they are unsure whether they have libertarian views.

Young Americans were more likely than any other group to accept libertarian values. Just 17 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds, 15 percent of 45- to 64-year-olds and 9 percent of those 65 and older said that their values aligned with libertarian principles.

The libertarian Reason magazine said the polling results are a good sign for the future of libertarianism.

“Millennials, it seems, are increasingly willing to reconsider the awkward and inconsistent political pairings of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. That’s why libertarianism has virtually replaced conservatism as the alternative to leftism for college students involved in political advocacy.”

Americans who do have libertarian leaning are split almost equally between the Democratic (12 percent) and Republican (13 percent) parties. Independents were the most likely to self-identify as libertarian, with 19 percent embracing the characterization.

For Paul, a candidate who’s made no secret of his plan to draw support from unconventional GOP voters like young Americans and disaffected Democrats, these numbers are good because they offer a pool of voters who could pad the support he lacks from social conservatives and foreign policy hawks.

Last week, The New York Times’ Paul Krugman asserted that Paul has no chance of winning in a national election because “there basically aren’t any libertarians” in the U.S.

“I wish I could say that Rand Paul can’t win because he believes in crank monetary economics, etc. But the truth is that these things matter much less than the fact that not many Americans consider themselves libertarian, and even those who do are deluding themselves,” Krugman wrote.

The liberal economist argued that there are also too few voters who fall into the categories of socially liberal and fiscally conservative or vice versa to embolden the Paul campaign because, “There are almost no genuine libertarians in America — and the people who like to use that name for themselves do not, in reality, love liberty.”

In a rebuttal to Krugman’s piece, FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver argued that often American views “are reasonably heterodox and not well represented by a one-dimensional political spectrum.”

“Take two issues that are taken as emblematic of the split between liberal and conservative viewpoints: gay marriage and income inequality,” Silver wrote. “If Krugman is right, you should see few Americans who are in favor of same-sex marriage but oppose government efforts to reduce income inequality, or vice versa.

“As it turns out, however, there are quite a number of them; about 4 in 10 Americans have ‘inconsistent’ views on these issues,” he continued. “The General Social Survey asks Americans whether they favor or oppose gay marriage.”

Still, Silver said that FiveThirtyEight is not optimistic about Paul’s chances for 2016. That’s mostly because of the outsized role partisanship plays in the primary elections.

“[T]he hard-core partisans who vote in presidential primaries are much more likely to take consistently liberal or conservative positions than the broader American population,” Silver wrote.

But as Paul continues to soften his libertarian views, there’s a chance that he could strike a balance that would give a majority of Americans a perfect candidate.

The YouGov poll shows that, in general, Americans embrace some libertarian values more than others:

Most Americans (51%) agree with the core idea of libertarianism that smaller governments are better governments, but that they are less convinced about other ideas common in libertarian circles. Americans tend to disagree (46%) rather than agree (34%) with the idea that poverty is generally more a result of individual failing than social problems. A large majority of Americans (68%) also agree with the idea that people occasionally need to be saved from themselves, something somewhat at odds with the libertarian idea that people should be free to do what they want, even if it damages them, as long as they are not hurting others.

In a nutshell, that means that large numbers of Americans are, like Paul, “libertarian-ish.”