You will not be surprised to learn that the candidate who has made the most appearances on the Sunday morning political talk shows is a gentleman who goes by the name of Donald Trump. Since March of this year, Trump has appeared on one of the five major Sunday programs -- ABC's "This Week," NBC's "Meet the Press," CBS's "Face the Nation," CNN's "State of the Union" or Fox's "Fox News Sunday" -- 33 times, five more times than the next-most popular guest, Ben Carson. Which probably didn't surprise you either.
What may surprise you, though, is the two candidates who are next in line. No, not Lindsey Graham. Creeping up on Carson are Bernie Sanders and John Kasich, each of whom appeared 25 times.
Notice that we sorted those bars by party and then by current polling average -- meaning that candidates further left are doing better and ones to the right are doing worse. But the number of times each has appeared on the Sunday shows isn't really correlated to that.
The five networks have hosted about the same number of candidates, ranging from 37 on Fox News to 53 on CBS. The candidates have been scattered across them, though Donald Trump hasn't been on Fox News much, perhaps in part because of his on-again, off-again feud with the network.
It's interesting, too, to look at how the number of appearances have changed over time. Trump didn't show up until June! He's been on TV a lot since then.
While it is clearly the case that the Republican candidates have been on the Sunday shows far more often, there are also far more of them. Republican candidates have only appeared slightly more often on average than Democratic ones (though Sanders is working overtime in that regard).
Not all candidates want to do the shows, of course. Hillary Clinton's only done it a handful of times, certainly by choice. Which tells us something else about Trump: When the shows want to have him on, he's usually willing to say yes.