Every reading on the front page is computed from public data, sourced from organizations whose work we did not write and could not replace. This page shows the math.
The Civic Forecast treats democracy like weather. It pulls live numbers from six independent civic-monitoring sources every morning, runs them through documented thresholds, and publishes a single page showing what the day's conditions look like.
Six indicators were chosen because each measures a different system that healthy democracies need to be working: a free press, functional courts, transparent government, a deliberative legislature, freedom of assembly, and rule-making accountability. When any one of them is under unusual stress, the page reflects that.
The vocabulary is meteorological by design. Words like elevated and turbulent describe pressure systems, not partisan judgments. The same word would appear under any administration if the underlying numbers warranted it.
Each indicator is a computed reading from a public dataset. Here are the sources, the math, and the status thresholds.
Counts of journalist arrests, assaults, equipment seizures, subpoenas, and denials of access in the United States.
pressfreedomtracker.us/api/. Updated continuously.Rulings on civil rights, voting access, executive power, and First Amendment matters.
courtlistener.com/api/ — free with registration, 5,000 calls/day.How transparent the federal government is, measured by FOIA response rates and denial patterns.
muckrock.com/api_v1/ — free.Whether the deliberative body is deliberating.
Protests, demonstrations, and any associated use-of-force incidents.
The rule-making and executive-action pulse of the administrative state.
federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1 — free, no key.Status words are deliberately archaic-poetic-meteorological. They are calibrated so that no individual word reads as partisan. The same vocabulary applies regardless of who is in power.
SEVERE-level readings are reserved for genuine multi-decade outliers. They appear rarely. Their presence on the front page is itself news.
Each morning at 06:00 ET an LLM (Anthropic Claude Haiku) is given the day's six readings and asked to produce one sentence. The sentence:
The full prompt template is versioned in the project repository. Any change to the prompt is logged in the changelog below. The advisory paragraph is generated by the same architecture with the same constraints, picking the single most consequential delta of the past 24 hours.
The single number you see at the top of the page (e.g. 62) is the Civic Pressure Index. It is a weighted composite of the six indicators, normalized 0–100, where 0 is calm under all conditions and 100 is historic on all six axes simultaneously.
It is not a quality-of-democracy score. It is a pressure reading. A high CPI means many systems are under unusual stress at once. A low CPI means most systems are running near baseline. CPI does not say whether the country is well-governed. It says whether the air pressure is rising.
Weights are documented in the open-source pipeline. Default weights are 1.0 for each indicator, but PRESS and SUNLIGHT carry a slight uplift in volatility because their effects compound the others.
The map is not a state-by-state choropleth. It renders each indicator's events as atmospheric pressure regions — soft, blurred, semi-transparent color zones that overlap and blend additively. A region that is both press-incident-elevated and protest-active will show a richer mixed color where the regions overlap. The whole thing drifts and pulses gently because weather is alive.
Geography is rendered with the Albers USA projection from the d3-geo / us-atlas library. Storm centers (the most intense cells) are marked with a small pulsing dot. The map updates whenever the underlying data updates.
The integrity of this practice depends on the methodology being open. Every claim on the front page is traceable to a specific line on this page. If you find an error, the source repository is public — file an issue.
This project would not exist without the daily, often unfunded work of the organizations whose data feeds it. None of these organizations endorse the Civic Forecast; their work simply makes it possible.
The geography is drawn with us-atlas by Mike Bostock. The site is built and maintained by Civic Designers, a 501(c)(3). Source code is open under Apache 2.0.