Pulse Report 1

Topic scoreboard

Each score is a weighted blend of three layers, opinion .4, expectation .4, attention .2, with every metric z-scored against its own trailing 52 weeks and mapped to ±100. A topic with no opinion series that has history is marked thin, gets no score, and stays out of the overall. Search volume plus market prices alone is not public mood. A positive score does not mean people feel good. It means the signals sit above their own past-year average, and the past year was itself a weak one for sentiment.

Divergence callouts

Synthesis

The overall Pulse sits at +11, in steady territory, after a one-week move of +23.7 that is identical to its four-week move, so the whole change is concentrated in this single week. AI sentiment is the strongest topic at +30 and the only one in the improving regime, lifted by a 72.2-point weekly gain, and the Civiqs good-or-bad tracker moved from more negative toward −13.2 with a +2.9 change even as Google Trends interest in AI risk, AI regulation, and AI taking jobs held flat at low levels. Economic mood is +12 and steady, though the opinion layer underneath it is soft: Civiqs' read on the economy now fell 2.2 to −32.4 and the Michigan index sat unchanged at 51.7, while prediction markets keep recession odds low on Kalshi at 0.012 and 0.076 and on Polymarket at 0.055, and search interest in layoffs dropped 10 points to 11. Presidential approval is the one negative composite at −9, and it carries both divergence callouts this week: opinion is the outlier at z=−2.0, with Civiqs approval down 1.7 to −24.4, while attention sits at z=+1.1 and expectation at z=+1.2, meaning the public's stated view is worse than either what it is searching for or what markets are pricing. Search interest in impeachment fell 6 points to 15 during that same stretch. Midterms, immigration, and institutional trust remain calibrating and thin, with no opinion series long enough to score, though the raw readings there are notable on their own, including Gallup's 89 percent saying corruption is widespread in government and 55 percent expressing at least a fair amount of confidence in it. The coherent story is a week where the composite rose on AI and a flat-to-firm economy layer while the one topic with real opinion history, presidential approval, saw stated sentiment sink below what attention and markets imply.

Evidence by topic

Rows marked LLM were extracted from Gallup and Harris release pages by Claude with a strict schema and have no history yet. Dashes mean the metric has no prior reading to compare against. The AI sentiment table shows four of sixteen Harris rows from one release on AI in personal-care shopping.