I confess....I have watched this show every season...and truly enjoy the competition night, though I do not watch the "results" show.
While I have never voted, it is popularity driven...either by who the star is, the professional, or by talent/improvement.
I think in the past, there have been good dancers who were "voted off"....simply because the people who vote, may have thought that "everyone else" would vote for a particular dancer, so they opt to vote for someone else.
I do think that Bristol has been kept on by a variety of voters. Tea Party people, Conservatives, those who like her mother are obvious.
However, I have also wondered if people have voted for her, just to be able to continue to mock her failures. The media and comedians have shredded Bristol ever since it was announced that the girl would be on the show. They certainly don't want her off the show, as it would eliminate a "hot topic" every Tuesday and Wednesday. She's been mocked, put down for her lack of dancing skill, and poor parenting skills "because she is abandoning her child to go off to Hollywood"...
Bristol has made tremendous strides in her dancing ability. She is finally starting to unfreeze a bit and show some emotion. She had taken every criticism from the judges to heart, and made the changes that they requested.
While Brandy was quite good...and as she herself said, she understood music, musicality, which made learning the different dance steps and routines easier for her than maybe someone without a music background. That, along with being a professional singer, dancer, actress, performer gave her quite a head start on many of the other "celebrity" dancers.
The problem I had with Brandy, and if I was a voter would have kept me from voting for her....was her professional dancer partner. He's a self-centered, egotistical, abusive jerk!! I'm sure many mothers, seeing the way he "coached/taught" Brandy, felt the same way, and therefore would not vote for them, just because they didn't want HIM to win!! On one of the shows, there was a clip of their rehearsal, and he was smacking her as his way of teaching. He was smacking her on her arm, her leg, her tush. It was not done as a joke or teasing, but as a "method" of teaching! When questioned about it after their dance, by the judges, she defended his teaching methods and said they worked for her personality, he said that was "his" was of teaching and it was effective. The judges were very critical of his "methods" and voiced them. To which he basically said, his teaching methods worked and they didn't know what they were talking about. The fact that Brandy was accepting and even defended his teaching skills, was quite disturbing to me. I would think it would be to a lot of women, and it's predominately women who watch and vote.
