Whitney Leavitt looked like a serious contender on Dancing with the Stars Season 34. She and professional partner Mark Ballas reached the November 18, 2025 semifinals, delivered two highly scored routines, and finished the night with 58 out of 60 judges' points. Yet they were eliminated before the finale.
That creates an obvious question: How could someone with one of the strongest judges' totals of the night fail to advance?
The most accurate answer is also the simplest: Whitney Leavitt did not advance because her combined result from judges' scores and live viewer votes placed her below the five couples who reached the final. The public was not given a full contestant-by-contestant vote total, so there is no verified way to say exactly how many votes she received, how large the gap was, or that one specific controversy caused her elimination.
This distinction matters because many online explanations go beyond what the published results can actually prove.
No. Her semifinal judges' scores were strong.
Leavitt and Ballas earned a total of 58 out of 60 on Prince Night. That put them among the highest-scoring couples in the semifinal rather than near the bottom on technical judging alone. Robert Irwin and Witney Carson finished slightly higher with 59 out of 60, while Leavitt's total was level with another leading pair.
ABC's own season coverage confirms that Leavitt and Ballas were eliminated on November 18 in the semifinals, leaving five couples for the finale. The network described her as a top contender. You can review ABC-owned Good Morning America’s Season 34 recap and its semifinal results update.
So the elimination cannot reasonably be explained as simply “the judges did not like her dancing.” Her scores show the opposite: the judges rated her very highly.
Dancing with the Stars does not determine eliminations from judges' scores alone. Viewer voting is also part of the result.
ABC described Season 34 as a competition pairing celebrities with professional ballroom dancers whose routines are evaluated by a panel of judges. The cast included Leavitt with Mark Ballas, alongside eventual champion Robert Irwin and the other Season 34 contestants. See the official ABC Season 34 cast announcement.
For the Season 34 finale, ABC's own reporting explicitly stated that the winner was determined by a combination of live viewer votes and judges' scores. Robert Irwin and Witney Carson ultimately won the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy. The ABC Audio finale report also notes that more than 72 million votes were cast during the finale.
The same basic structure explains why high judges' scores do not guarantee survival. A couple can perform extremely well with the judges and still be eliminated if its combined standing after audience voting is lower than those of the other remaining couples.
Not necessarily — and this is where careful wording matters.
The elimination result establishes that her combined judges-and-viewer outcome was the lowest among the six semifinal couples. It does not, by itself, reveal her raw viewer-vote rank.
Why? Because two inputs were combined. A contestant with slightly lower judges' scores could still survive with a stronger audience vote. Conversely, a contestant with excellent judges' scores could be overtaken if another couple received enough public support.
The show did not publish a complete table showing exactly how many live votes each semifinalist received. Without those numbers, it is impossible to reconstruct the precise voting gap from public information alone.
The final on-screen reveal should not automatically be interpreted as a ranked bottom two unless the show explicitly says so.
Competition programs often reveal safe couples in an order designed for television suspense. Being one of the final two couples shown waiting for a result does not necessarily prove those two had the two lowest combined totals.
What is verified is that Leavitt and Ballas were the pair eliminated from the six-couple semifinal. That is the result worth relying on.
There is no published vote breakdown that proves that.
Leavitt entered Dancing with the Stars with a large existing audience from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and viewers naturally brought opinions about reality-TV personalities into the ballroom. During and after Season 34, online discussion included criticism of Leavitt, her prior comments, her dance background, and her reality-show persona.
Those factors could influence how individual viewers vote. But that is different from demonstrating that they caused the elimination.
To establish that claim, we would need evidence such as detailed voting data, statistically reliable audience research, or an official explanation linking a measurable vote shift to a specific event. Those data have not been publicly released.
So a responsible summary is: audience sentiment mattered because viewer voting mattered, but the public evidence does not identify one verified reason for her audience-vote performance.
It is possible that some viewers considered her prior dance experience when deciding whom to support, but again, that cannot be quantified from the official results.
There is a recurring dynamic on celebrity dance competitions: being skilled early can create high expectations. A contestant who begins strongly may receive less of an obvious “growth journey” narrative than someone who starts with little ballroom experience and improves visibly from week to week.
That is a plausible audience-response pattern, not a verified explanation for Leavitt's elimination. The voting totals needed to prove its effect were not released.
Yes, because the semifinal field was unusually competitive.
At that stage of the season, score differences were small. Leavitt's 58/60 was excellent, but several other semifinalists were also clustered near the top of the judges' leaderboard. When judges' totals are close, viewer voting can become especially important because there is less scoring distance separating the couples.
This is one reason a near-perfect score can look misleading when viewed by itself. A 58/60 sounds almost unbeatable in isolation. In a semifinal where several contestants are scoring in roughly the same range, however, it may provide less protection than viewers assume.
The five Season 34 finalists were:
Robert Irwin and Witney Carson won the season. Alix Earle and Val Chmerkovskiy finished second, Jordan Chiles and Ezra Sosa third, Dylan Efron and Daniella Karagach fourth, and Elaine Hendrix and Alan Bersten fifth, according to Good Morning America’s official finale report.
Yes. Her judges' scores, longevity in the competition, and semifinal position all support describing her as a serious contender.
ABC's post-season recap called her elimination unexpected and referred to her as a top contender. That framing is consistent with the basic facts: she reached the final six and posted one of the strongest judges' totals in the semifinal.
But being a contender is not the same as being guaranteed a finale spot. In a format driven partly by public voting, technical quality is only one part of the competition.
She did not perform a competing freestyle in the official Season 34 finale because she had already been eliminated in the semifinal.
That matters because the freestyle is traditionally one of the most anticipated finale routines. Her absence from that round contributed to the sense among some viewers that her run ended abruptly, especially given how highly she had scored the previous week.
The five official finalists instead performed the finale rounds that ultimately determined the Mirrorball winner.
After leaving the competition, Leavitt described the experience positively despite the disappointment. ABC's season recap reported her saying that the show had changed her life and that she felt deeply grateful for the experience.
Her career also moved quickly afterward. In December 2025, ABC's Good Morning America reported that she had been cast as Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival of Chicago, marking her professional theatrical debut. See GMA’s Broadway announcement coverage.
That does not change what happened on DWTS, but it adds useful context: the semifinal elimination ended her competition run, not her momentum as a performer.
Because she never reached the Season 34 finale. Whitney Leavitt and Mark Ballas were eliminated in the November 18, 2025 semifinal after the show's combination of judges' scores and viewer votes placed them below the five advancing couples.
What makes the result notable is that her dancing was not poorly scored. She earned 58/60, making her elimination a clear example of how Dancing with the Stars is not simply a judges' leaderboard.
The evidence supports three firm conclusions:
What the evidence does not establish is an exact audience vote total or a single motive explaining why viewers voted as they did. Claims that one scandal, one comment, her prior dance background, or one segment of the audience definitively caused her elimination remain interpretations unless additional voting data are released.
That is the key to understanding the result: Whitney Leavitt did not lose because she suddenly stopped dancing well. She lost in a format where excellent dancing and public support had to work together, and the public numbers needed to explain the second part in detail were never disclosed.
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