It is always interesting to see how trends change overnight in areas such as American Idol! First off, the final
DialIdol.com results came in and gave Lauren a solid "green" of safety which means they predict either Haley or James is going home tonight. Another interesting shift I saw was with the Idol Chatter
elimination poll at USA Today:
Last night at about 11:00pm Central time there were 1,900 votes where 42% picked Lauren to leave tonight and 40% picked Haley. This morning there are over 6,300 votes and the favored contestant to leave has switched from Lauren (37%) to Haley (45%). I also checked the
betting odds at
bodog.com and there has been some subtle shifts which are best illustrated by my graph:
James has seen his odds drop from being tied with Scotty 's 3/2 to 8/5, but that is barely noticeable (1.5 versus 1.6), but what is more noticeable is the trend with the two ladies. Haley's odds have been fairly stable at 7/2 for a week, but Lauren has seen her odds of winning continue to drop, from 4/1 on May 6, to 9/2 on May 10 and now at 11/2 on May 12. Even if Lauren survives tonight over Haley (or maybe even James?) she is unlikely to actually win the whole thing unless something horrible happens to Scotty. Another thing to notice on the trend lines of the two guys is how erratic James' trend line is compared to Scotty's numbers. James has a lot more highs and lows and Scotty just keeps on giving the same solid and improving odds.
My other favorite site with numbers is
WhatNotToSing.com which now has preliminary web scores for last night:
Haley again leads the night with the top score (like last week) but also has the second to the lowest score. It seems like 3 of the 4 contestants had one strong performance and one weak one with the exception of James who had two fairly mediocre ones. Haley and James both had the advantage of having their second songs rate higher whereas both Lauren and Scotty had their better performance first. If we average the two scores for each contestant Haley and Lauren are practically tied this week at 63 (Lauren is really 63.5), followed by James at 57 and Scotty at 50.5. In comparison, last week Haley led easily with an average of 83, followed by Lauren at 79, Scotty at 55.5, James at 41.5 and Jacob at the bottom with 24.5. So this week the range in performance rankings is much smaller between the contestants than last week. We shall see what happens tonight!
