Based on Math Alone, Where Does Andy Richter’s 'DWTS' Run End?

I’m a very recent convert to Dancing with the Stars for a few reasons: the production values are great, the dancers are eager, and it’s a fun show to watch with my daughters. But there’s also the Andy Richter factor, which I find incredibly fascinating, as he continues to overcome the lowest judges’ scores of the week and survive based on fan votes.

What I’m most fascinated with is the math of it all. While we never see the raw viewer votes on the show, we do know how the math is calculated. Each week, the percentage of the judges’ points each dancer earned is added to the percentage of the audience votes each dancer gets. The lowest total goes home. That basically means a relatively small edge with the audience can cancel out a much larger gap with the judges, as we’ve been seeing with Andy Richter.

To wit: this week, there were eight dancers left. We know the judges’ scores, and we know that Andy’s judges’ percentage was about 11 percent compared to Danielle Fishel’s 12 percent — less than a one-point difference. If his fans outvoted hers by even a single percentage point, he’d survive, which is precisely what happened.

That’s an easy gap to overcome for someone as popular as Andy Richter. But at what point does the math finally start to break against him? As the field narrows, that gap widens. Assuming the same judges’ scores, with six dancers, Andy’s judges’ share rises to around 15 percent, but everyone else’s rises too. He has to beat them by roughly two points in viewer votes to stay safe. By the time it’s down to four, he needs about a three-point advantage over the middle pack and closer to four or five points to topple the top two scorers.

That’s why I think Andy survives two more weeks before the math finally catches up to him. My intuition is this: if Whitney — arguably the best dancer but probably the weakest in audience connection — finishes first with the judges but last with viewers, Andy’s loyal fans could easily put him ahead of her. I do think he has more than a five-point advantage over her with the audience. Mathematically speaking, I think Whitney goes home next week, even if she gets top marks. Likewise, Elaine Hendrix, a solid mid-tier dancer with a polite but not frenzied following, would likely fall next because Richter probably has more than a two- or three-point advantage over her with the audience.

But then the numbers tighten. Once Andy faces dancers who also have strong fan bases, such as Jordan, Dylan, Robert, or Alix, the math turns against him. Their judges’ scores and their votes both go up, leaving him without enough surplus to compensate.

For example, assuming Elaine and Whitney go next, and assuming the same judges’ scores as this week in the top five, here’s what we’re looking at:

With five dancers left, Andy needs to beat the others by roughly two to three percentage points in viewer votes to stay in the competition. That’s tougher than before when he was up against contestants without massive fan bases (Corey Feldman, Jen Affleck), but it’s still doable for a highly motivated fan base. Still, in this scenario, the four other dancers also have highly motivated fan bases, and Richter finally won’t be able to overcome the gap.

At least he’ll have given the season its most entertaining subplot: a walking statistical anomaly powered by meme enthusiasm, record-breaking text votes, and the joy of chaos math.