Illustration by Olivier Kugler

It’s not just a big two weeks for Barack Obama and John McCain; it’s a big two weeks for the pundit class, who’ll spend four days in Denver and then four days in St. Paul incessantly chattering about everything the two candidates—and their entourages—say and do. And with some 15,000 credentialed media folk at each convention, the opinionmongers will be trying hard to stand out from the crowd. Who’s most popular? We developed a highly scientific formula to measure their star power, counting blog, newspaper, magazine, and TV-news mentions so far this year, Google hits, and how many presidential debates (in the primaries or planned for the general election) they moderated. Then, each pundit’s popularity in each category was calculated as a percentage of the highest score, and those five percentages were averaged. (So, theoretically, a dominating pundit who topped each tally would end up with a popularity score of 100.) Here’s the top 40.

Name	Google	Blogs	Print	TV	Debates	The Popularity Score!
1. Karl Rove	4.93 mil.	71,367	3,813	778	0	67.79
2. Rush Limbaugh	5.44 mil.	71,011	4,125	585	0	67.35
3. Jon Stewart	6.39 mil.	62,901	3,957	3342	0	62.77
4. Bill O’Reilly	4.61 mil.	53,105	2,046	1,122	0	59.23
5. Chris Matthews	2.86 mil.	40,750	1,754	47	2	47.31
6. G. Stephanopoulos	527,000	15,993	1,255	777	3	41.07
7. Stephen Colbert	3.8 mil.	44,933	2,622	174	0	40.30
8. Chris Wallace	759,000 .	12,307	1,023	293	4	36.01
9. Sean Hannity	2.36 mil.	27,114	1,174	796	0	34.87
10. Keith Olbermann	2.38 mil.	39,532	942	323	1	33.85
11. Ann Coulter	4.52 mil.	37,154	1,024	139	0	32.00
12. Lou Dobbs	2.07 mil.	19,463	678	39	0	28.57
13. George Wil	1.70 mil.	16,132	3,164	163	0	28.09
14. David Brooks	3.26 mil.	19,855	1,690	83	0	25.44
15. Tom Brokaw	1.18 mil.	18,394	1,414	238	1	24.95
16. Paul Krugman	3.73 mil.	22,461	866	33	0	22.76
17. Glenn Beck	1.85 mil.	21,539	831	273	0	20.72
18. Pat Buchanan	1.68 mil.	23,135	848	234	0	20.02
19. Michelle Malkin	2.74 mil.	27,040	615	38	0	19.81
20. Maureen Dowd	2.44 mil.	14,484	1,117	83	0	18.59
21. James Carville	514,000	12,690	1,266	402	0	18.47
22. Dick Morris	1.61 mil.	13,574	561	277	0	16.50
23. Bob Schieffer	406,000	6,884	507	305	1	16.09
24. A. Huffington	1.19 mil.	11,507	1,405	130	0	16.08
25. Bill Kristol	1.24 mil.	17,615	658	219	0	15.91
26. David Gregory	452,000	6,907	571	533	0	15.62
27. Andrea Mitchell	328,000	12,384	320	435	0	13.80
28. C. Krauthammer	904,000 .	9,157	1,131	144	0	13.45
29. Laura Ingraham	1.11 mil .	8,842	355	298	0	12.99
30. Jim Lehrer	893,000	6,185	461	16	1	12.05
31. Andrew Sullivan	2.34 mil.	3,704	561	25	25	11.53
32. Frank Rich	2.01 mil.	9,398	35	3 3	0	11.24
33. Donna Brazile	187,000	5,699	479	369	0	11.08
34. Chuck Todd	241,000	13,250	229	303	0	10.98
35. Hugh Hewitt	2.06 mil.	10,539	112	32	0	10.51
36. Glenn Greenwald	1.74 mil.	15,501	83	1	0	10.21
37. David Gergen	211,000	4,048	207	375	0	9.48
38. Jake Tapper	203,000	9,286	133	288	0	9.02
39. Jeffrey Toobin	192,000	2,620	230	346	0	8.62
40. Jonah Goldberg	1.11 mil.	1,199	745	53	0	8.37

Calculations by Katherine Ward

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