the.com/electorate
The crowd that's always right, even when it's catastrophically wrong.
means The body of people in a country or area who are entitled to vote in an election.
from Built from 'elect,' tracing back to Latin 'eligere' — 'to pick out' — from 'ex-' (out) plus 'legere' (to choose, gather, read). 'Electorate' itself piggybacked on 'elector,' a word with a specific pedigree: the German prince-electors (Kurfürsten) who, for centuries, held the actual right to choose the Holy Roman Emperor. English widened that narrow, princely privilege into the whole mass of ordinary voters — so the word's history runs backward from a handful of noblemen picking a monarch to millions of citizens picking anyone at all.
- etymology
- from electus, the chosen — but they do the choosing
- turnout math
- usually decided by the half who show up
- memory span
- famously short, pollsters famously surprised anyway
- true power
- collectively godlike, individually one anonymous checkbox