Inside the Amazingly Stupid Far-Right Campaign to Keep Sean Spicer on 'Dancing With the Stars'

From Esquire

When Sean Spicer first appeared on Dancing with the Stars in a giant neon green blouse, no one particularly expected his tenure to in the competition to last very long. A celebrity for the most 2019 of reasons, Spicer's botched inaugural Salsa spelled immediate elimination. Yet, seven weeks later, he remains. His lingering presence on DWTS is baffling when considering the quality of his dancing and his abysmal judge scores.

Throughout this season, Spicer has maintained an average weekly score of 17.5 points out of 30 from the judges. He is handily the weakest technical dancer left in the mix, landing below two other eliminated teams' averages. An average that low typically guarantees a week one or two exit in past seasons, but that’s not the case this round. For reference, other dancers are regularly scoring in the 24-27 range from judges, Spicer remains in the 19-21 point area.

But judges' scores only accounts for a part of the criteria for keeping a dancer in the competition. The official voting FAQ explains the process as follows:

Live voting makes up for those scores though, and as the competition narrows, Spicer lives on. While Dancing with the Stars keeps its voting algorithm fairly private, the notion is that a combination of viewers votes and judges' scores keep a competitor in the competition. Similar personalities and scorers would have been voted out by now based on how much the judges' scores drag down their overall average (see: Tucker Carlson, Rick Perry). Even with high popularity, low scorers typically don't last past week two, maybe three. Spicer's average—a full six points lower than the next lowest competitor—will carry him to week eight. And he hasn't just escaped elimination—he's never been declared to be in jeopardy of going home. With only seven competitors remaining, let's speculate on Spicer's secret to success.

The most obvious explanation is to look at the audience votes that compensate for the abysmal scores. While every contestant has some version of an online campaign, Spicer’s is different—an online campaign to save him isn’t particularly being run by people who watch the show. Instead, it’s a wall of people—viewers and non-viewers—rallying to stack votes in his favor to make a political statement. Even those rallying in the campaign admit that his dancing is terrible, but that’s not the point. The campaign to keep Spicer dancing is a troll-campaign attempting to carve out a place for Trump’s ideologies in the entertainment industry.

The further you dive into conservative corners of social media, the more concentrated the campaign becomes. Echoes of “not being heard” and “not even a fan of the show” are frequent, but they all have the same refrain: vote for Spicer to make a point. The campaign urges conservatives to use their 10 votes to create wall of sorts, seemingly protecting Spicer week to week, placing popularity over skill and accomplishing the goal of keeping him on television.

While there’s no way to ensure where votes are coming from, that dual system of judges' scores and viewer votes would indicate that fanfare—enough to compensate for bad scores—have to be coming from somewhere. And the votes for Spicer (placeable via phone, text, or Facebook) have been large enough to keep him well out of harm's way.

And to all of that, I suppose the bigger question is what exactly is the end game? Clearly it's getting Sean Spicer his own mirror ball trophy and a first place finish to "own the libs," but beyond that—what's the point? It feels more like a desperate grab for conservative relevancy in the entertainment industry its come to loathe.

Part of that vitriol feels reminiscent of past attempts to conjure up a place where conservative ideology fits in with entertainment. The reclaiming of Taylor Swift as a conservative hero was a bust. Roseanne's reboot was dismantled after a rise of racist tweets prompting a swift boycott of ABC, and a boycott of Toy Story 4 percolated after a conservative group deemed a lesbian scene inappropriate. Taylor Swift is doing fine, Roseanne became The Conners, and Toy Story 4 is the third-highest grossing film of the year.

There's something strangely appropriate that an online campaign could be what's keeping Sean Spicer on a reality show. He is the machination of reality television's most well-known figure, and the bowels of the internet prop him up in the same way that old voting hacks like DialIdol kept joke American Idol contestants in contention in the earliest years of the show. But this time, the ploy isn't just a campaign to troll one of America's most popular shows—it's an attempt to make the statement that a mirror ball trophy represents relevance. And they'll take what they can get, even if it's on a dance floor.

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