Actually, it makes a lot of sense with a bit of background knowledge. See with people being able to pick their teams, this ultimately leads to a number of factors that contribute to the popular team actually tending to lose because of its size. Two things to know about the Splatfest is:A. Only matches between opposite choice teams will count towards the win percentage.B. If enough time passes and a team of opposite pick players isn't found, you'll automatically enter a match against your own team, which, given A, doesn't count.Coupled with the greater size of one group, this ultimately results in:A. The popular team tends to have the bigger pool of far less skilled players that lose and hurt the standing.B. The popular team tends to have fewer matches on average than non-popular players that truly count towards the win percentage.C. Certain players with this knowledge actually will pick the non-popular pick to get more games, thus helping the win percentage.This ultimately contributes to the popular pick tending to lose, as back with the original Splatoon, all but two Splatfests could be predicted by an OPPOSITE popularity contest. And this was before Splatfests were influenced by character popularity. Marie and Calie were, and I mean no disrespect by this, basically the same save for color so the only time they significantly influenced a Splatfest pick was the last one where you HAD to choose between them (with the results almost being 50-50). In contrast the disparity in popularity between Marina and Pearl has a huge impact on people's Splatfest choice. I wouldn't be surprised if Marina's picks won every Splatfest popular vote in the future, she's that appealing to people in comparison to Pearl.Sure the World Premiere Splatfest for Splatoon 2 is an outlier, but that was a much shorter run with way more server issues. Honestly most of this could be fixed if they removed the process that forces popular team players to face themselves, but that would result in super long queues and I think that would damn Splatoon as a whole as opposed to just the Splatfests.So.. yeah. That's why. Apologies for the long spiel, but I hope I helped you understand