Five of our Celeb Dirty Laundry elves jumped from a toy bridge last night during the X-Factor USA finale. It was written in the stars – Carly Rose Sonenclar was the unofficial winner of the show. The trends and the polls indicated that she was going to walk away with the title, but in a massive upset, Tate Stevens took home the ultimate prize. The country star with the charming personality and the romantic vocals became the second season winner of the greatest reality television show on the planet. What happened? Why did he win? Why didn’t Carly stay true to the polls and trends? What was the reason behind his win?
Firstly, we’d like to congratulate Tate on his spectacular prize. We don’t want to take the special moment away from his and/or his fans, so from Celeb Dirty Laundry to you, “Congratulations, dude! You deserve it!” Secondly, we’d like to officially discuss why Carly did not win.
Reality television voting is more often than not a science – certain contestants tap into specific, recurring demographics and win over votes in those age groups. Several of these demographic voting blocs contain more viewers and/or more votes – it all depends on the viewership. X-Factor is predominantly a tween and middle-aged demographic, but please note that this does not exclude other demographics. Certain contestants are able to more fluently tap into a demographic and relate to the audience at home both with their vocals, song choice, and personality.
Front-runner contestants – like Tate and Carly – usually encompass all of the voting demographics, but for some odd reason, the finale of a contest switches up these demographics and adds independent voters to the mix. (An independent voting bloc votes randomly and/or for their second, third, or fourth favorite act) However, if you’ve been following our in-depth X-Factor voting posts on CDL, you would have noticed that we always discuss how independent voters are able to influence the final vote.
We use this as an example: There are a total of 100 apples. Tate has 20 green apples (voting blocs), while Carly has 30 green apples. The remaining 50 red apples (independent voting blocs) need to be given to either of the contestants at the finale. There’s a huge margin of apples that can be given to either Tate or Carly, but let’s explain this as the final cookie crumbled. Tate receives 30 red apples – so his total would be 50 apples (red & green), Carly receives 20 red apples – so her total would be 50 apples (red & green). It’s a tie. Then comes the tricky part… As we discussed at length throughout the week, several independent voting blocs love to vote randomly. So if we take away 5 red apples from Carly and hand them to Tate, his total stands at 55 apples, while her total stands at 45 apples. Tate is now in the lead. However, we have to account for viewers not voting and for independent votes handed to Fifth Harmony. So, we remove 10 rotten apples from Carly and Tate, and we remove another five apples from Carly and Tate and hand them to Fifth Harmony. Tate’s total – 40 apples; Carly’s total – 30 apples; Fifth Harmony total – 10 apples. Tate is still in the lead. However, the 5 random apples given to Tate from Carly’s pool of apples could be absolutely any amount. In fact, they’re so random that they could have been handed to Fifth Harmony for all we know. Tate won the competition, so those 5 random apples had to come from either Carly’s pool of apples and/or Fifth Harmony’s pool of apples. Even if all of the variables are accounted for – e.g. Carly could have had 49 apples, and Tate could have had 51 apples – there’s still so much to take into account when it comes to the science of reality television.
Unfortunately, what makes this more of a difficulty is that we don’t have the final statistics before the finale, so we can only follow trends and opinion polls to deduce who we think the winner might be. When all is said and done, and all variables are accounted for, Tate still deserves to be the winner. He is the winner of X-Factor USA and he should be treated as the winner of X-Factor USA. No amount of mathematical deduction and/or theories will take away what he has been able to achieve. We hate being “those” people who freak out over a reality television upset, as the winner deserves the title based on what he/she did throughout the entire season. We would have liked to see Carly win, but it just wasn’t in her cards.
Now break out your spurs and country hats, because the US music scene is about to go country on y’all!
Congratulations Tate!
