Fifty-four percent of Americans think Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol is one of the finalists on ABC’s competition series “Dancing With the Stars” because of large-scale voting by viewers who support her mother, according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News.
Just 14 percent of respondents think Bristol is still in the competition because she is one of this season’s best dancers on the show.
An additional 26 percent responded that they had no opinion on the subject. (The remaining respondents cited either “both” reasons or “neither.”)
This edition of “Dancing With the Stars” – on which Bristol is a finalist with “Dirty Dancing” star Jennifer Grey and Disney star Kyle Massey – is being watched by an average of 21 million viewers. That is a very big audience for a TV show these days, but that audience represents only about 7 percent of Nielsen Media’s universe, which is now estimated to be nearly 295 million people between the ages of 2 and death.