As demand for political polls and punditry skyrockets during the presidential election season, Real Clear Politics (realclearpolitics.com) has emerged as a Web site to watch.

In just a few months, the news-aggregating site has vaulted to the forefront of online commentary, with Web traffic quadrupling to 3 million unique users in January from a modest 750,000 in September.

“The site has already done a huge service by boosting the IQ of all political junkies,” an associate editor at Reason Magazine, David Weigel, said. “Between the polls and the local stories … the site is doing a lot to democratize punditry.”

Formed by two 38-year-old Princeton University graduates, John McIntyre and Thomas Bevan, the site has grown in election-season spurts since it first went online eight years ago. It has expanded from a two-man operation on a shoestring budget to a full-time staff of more than two-dozen employees overseeing the company’s mainstay, Real Clear Politics, as well as two smaller sites, Real Clear Markets and Real Clear Sports.

In the past year, the company’s pockets have also grown deeper. Originally subsisting on irregular ad revenues and an annual pledge drive, it now boasts a partnership with Forbes, which bought a 51% stake in the sites last October.

Mr. McIntyre would not divulge the price that the press company paid, nor would he say whether the company was profitable.

Forbes “is becoming more aggressive on the Internet and they recognized us as an opportunity to invest,” Mr. McIntyre said of the deal.

The timing could not be better for the company, Mr. Bevan said. “We’ve had one historic election after the next, but this one especially is bringing tons of people online,” he said. “We’ve been going on this cycle for almost two years, and interest still hasn’t fallen.”

Updated every day between 5 a.m. and 10 p.m. Central time, the Real Clear sites, which are based at Chicago, aggregate content from a wide range of sources that run the gamut of locations and political persuasions.

Stories from the Washington Post frequently run alongside articles from such lesser-knowns as the Ottawa Citizen, while analyses from the left-leaning New Republic may be paired with more conservative publications such as the Weekly Standard.

The goal is “to give readers ideological diversity,” Mr. McIntyre said. “We’re trying to stay immersed in the nation’s political bloodstream at all times. That way, we can show you every small, little twist and turn, and give multiple sides to every story.”

An options trader in the 1990s, Mr. McIntyre said he first came up with the idea for Real Clear Politics during lulls in activity on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He began bringing five or six newspapers to the floor each day, and later, when the floor became equipped with computers, Mr. McIntyre took to trolling the opinion pages of all of the local and national publications he could find online.

Eventually, the idea to aggregate the content of these pages coalesced. In 2000, Mr. McIntyre and his former roommate, Mr. Bevan, launched Real Clear Politics and Real Clear Markets, offering a daily selection of news, Op-Eds, editorials, analyses, and polling data.

With Mr. McIntyre stuck in his trading job and Mr. Bevan toiling as an advertising account executive, they soon found the task of managing the Web sites too difficult, and after several months shelved the finance site.

The politics site, meanwhile, grew steadily in popularity. Then in 2004, nationwide interest in the presidential election catapulted Real Clear Politics into the spotlight, causing user traffic to soar into the millions and prompting the founders to quit their day jobs and work full-time on the site.

The following year, the co-founders brought Chicago-area investor Alan Warms on board as the publisher.

Then, after a series of disagreement over the company’s longterm future, Messrs. McIntyre and Bevan decided to end the partnership with Mr. Warms, now a general manager at Yahoo News, and build their company independently.

By October 2007, they had not only inked a deal giving Forbes a 51% stake in the company, but also brought the jettisoned finance site, Real Clear Markets, back online alongside a newer vehicle, Real Clear Sports.

The company also formed a partnership with a conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, which sponsors the Web page “Unconventional Wisdom,” a discussion forum on fiscal, monetary, and tax policy.

Now that the political election season is nearing its peak, the company’s founders are looking toward the post-election season and plans for boosting their newest sites.

“We’d like to start bringing Real Clear Sport and Real Clear Markets to a wider audience,” Mr. McIntyre said, “but that will have to come after the political season. … Right now, we’ve got an election to get through.”