I even saw Ned commenting about how much traffic these two draw into the platform.

The info that I have so far encountered, lower rep accounts have minimal impact on higher rep accounts. (Not sure if it's the opposite the other way around) And the lower your rep is, the harder it will be to move one reputation point up.

What's interesting here is that even bernie has the lowest rep, he's still in the platform. I also remember that there was only 1 user (as far as I can remember from one of Bernie's comments) who was responsible for putting Bernie's rep to the negative.