Since over half of the overnight votes (not even 100 yet) are not sure they are done with haunts yet, any predications made now are most certainly going to be wrong. Very wrong.
So let’s do that…
It has been five years since the last DMHH Victim’s Choice voting. I still expect the overall outcome to be very similar to past years, with two haunts taking most of the categories.
I was quite surprised to see both of them getting absolutely trounced in the initial voting from last night. There are so many new competing options that did not exist in 2018 that the whole haunt dynamic for Des Moines is very different. The more fragmented the audience gets, the less predictable the voting becomes.
Think of it like voting for a favorite TV station back when you usually had only a few TV stations (yeah, I’m old), versus cable with a hundred channels, versus streaming with millions of shows available on demand.
I think we have entered the early cable days with the haunt scene here.
This is going to be fun to watch, though I feel bad for any haunts that may get absolutely crushed.
DISCLAIMER: The results, as always, only represent a tiny portion of the haunt-going audience. These are folks so die-hard that they follow a site like DMHauntedHouses (or a haunted house site/social media). This naturally gives a haunt with a larger following an advantage, but in the past, a haunt with one of the smallest social media followings has come out on top in many categories. Just remember this is all for fun, and for bragging rights.