Idol Recap: The Top 5 results are in. Skylar Laine sent home in another surprise elimination

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Well, that was a surprise. Fresh off having one of the best weeks yet, America voted to send Skylar Laine home last night. Laine, easily the most feisty of contestants that remained on Idol this far into the competition, had a stronger performance than her friend Hollie Cavanagh, who joined Laine in the bottom two.

Alas, at this point in the competition, it's not necessarily about who is the strongest performer. Rather, it's about who can recruit more fans and mobilize them to the voting lines. Laine, it seems, failed to do that. Or has she?

If American Idol is a contest about who has the biggest web presence -- the most Twitter followers or the most views on YouTube -- then Jessica Sanchez is sure to win this season, with 268,601 Twitter followers, the most of any Top 5 finalist. Sanchez has more than even Phillip Phillips, the ever-favorite of the season with with 250,015 followers. However, even Twitter support doesn't concretely explain how contestants are being eliminated, because if the lowest numbers of followers were the case, Joshua Ledet and Hollie Cavanagh, at roughly 79,000 and 86,000, respectively, would have been long gone before Skylar Laine, who has about 115,000 followers.

It just goes to show that at this point in the Idol contest, there's no clear prediction of who may make it to the finale, since the talent is so strong. Yet, if any contestant slips up in a given week and fails to deliver to their core fan-base -- in Laine's case, traditional country fans -- they're sure to go home.

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