"The Voice" was a real nail-biter Tuesday night, but while viewers were on the edge of their seats to find out whether it would be Kristen Merlin, Kat Perkins or Christina Grimmie who would be saved by fan votes, two of the contenders were sure they already knew how it would go — with Grimmie sticking around for next week's finale showdown.
“I knew in my heart what would happen,” Merlin told reporters after the show. “How do you stack up against Christina Grimmie? She’s amazing.”
Still, Grimmie was in the bottom three. Did that give Merlin hope? “There’s always that,” she told TODAY. “I was hopeful for some kind of comeback, but I’m not mad. I’m (in the) Top 5, and I came up through an open call.”
Perkins, who was saved the last two weeks by the Twitter votes, likewise felt that Grimmie would be the one to join Jake Worthington and Josh Kaufman in the final three.
“How do you compete with someone who’s got a following like that?” Perkins said. “She’s worked her butt off for several years to (develop it), long before I even thought about doing this. You can’t discount that.”
Perkins concurred with her coach, Adam Levine, who said that if Grimmie made it to the finals, she’d emerge the final winner.
“I honestly do think she’ll win this whole thing,” Perkins added.
And it's no wonder Perkins believes that. That following of Grimmie's that she mentioned can easily be seen on Twitter, where Gimmie's fans follow her in far bigger numbers (over 531,000, while Merlin and Perkins have, respectively, just over 39,000 and 48,000).
And speaking of Twitter, during the all-important save campaign Tuesday night, a graphic was displayed on-screen that tracked percentages of Twitter votes for each of the bottom three. Then it suddenly went away. What was that all about?
“We had an issue with the graphic,” host Carson Daly explained on-air. “The graphic was messed up, (so) we took it off.”
“They told me afterwards that it got stuck,” Perkins explained to TODAY after the show. “Something malfunctioned, and it wasn’t displaying what was actually happening so they decided to take it out. They double-checked the results to make sure it didn’t affect anything.”
Ultimately, Perkins chalked it all to Grimmie's big fan base.
“What if she blew up the entire (Twitter) system because of re-tweeting?" Perkins joked. "(Christina’s) re-tweets were 33,000 and mine were, like, at 12! She probably blew it up!”
See if Grimmie's fans can carry her all the way to the win that Perkins predicts when "The Voice" finals air Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. on NBC.