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Friday, May 12, 2006
Did Popularity Backfire on 'Idol' Vote?
Why did America boot Chris Daugherty off American Idol? Before the vote, the conventional opinion was he so good and popular, he had to make the final two. After the vote, people concluded: Maybe he wasn't so popular.
Ain't necessarily so. Maybe the voters outsmarted themselves. Thinking Chris and Katharine were safe, maybe many voters focused on the bottom two. The Taylor haters voted for Elliott. The Elliott haters voted for Taylor. Let's make that vote count! Boom, a backfire effect. Those two got the most votes, and Chris got the boot. Or, as many mathematicians realize, any time you have more than two candidates in a vote, crazy things can happen. That's why the adage says a camel's a horse invented by a committee. That's why groups end up going to restaurants nobody in the group really loves. That's why candidates who triumph in the New Hampshire primary with a fraction of the votes can be perceived as big winners -- and flounder when it's one-on-one in the fall. That's why predicting winners of the five-horse Oscar race is often so surprising (like when arty Chariots of Fire triumphed in 1983 over beloved On Golden Pond and Tootsie, which split each other's votes). It's even mathematically possible that one-on-0ne Chris could have beaten each of the other three, because he was in everybody's top 2. But in a four-horse race he loses to choices voters either love or hate.
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