Hot predictions for the September election!

So, finally, the opposition MUD gave its official nominations.  There are good stuff such as Jose Molina running for circuit 5 in Caracas and bad stuff such as the always defeated William Davila in Merida lone safe seat.  But I will wait for the results of the primary elections tomorrow, and the PSUV ones, before I start the long and arduous work of judging as many races as possible (I cannot deal with the 160 races but I will try to have a reasonable opinion on half of them, though it will take weeks).  Still, today, for fun, I did a first evaluation of the next National Assembly composition.  How I came to this is written below the graph, and note, I was rather optimistic.  Also, the total of seats is not exact as, e.g. I did not included the Native seats.  Enjoy.



I went district by district guessing on memory and recent developments who had the best chance to win at this point.  The legend sorts of speak for itself as to how I distributed the final count.  Some precisions

"other" refers to the sum of the political parties that will not get at least 4 seats at this point. These 18 seats include LCR, Independents, etc...
"undefined" are those from tomorrow primaries that the opposition should win in September, but we need to wait for these results until we can add them up to the individual party total
"undecided" are those seats that are too close to call.  Although many lean to chavismo, I included in this lot those seats where the Falcon effect could play tricks with chavismo, robbing it of up to half a dozen seats or so.  In other words, those 31 districts are the real battleground seats.

Preliminary observations

Right now we seem to have a slight advantage: chavismo 60 sure and the opposition 69.  Again, I am in an unfounded optimistic mood tonight, and the 31 missing are going in majority to chavismo (gerrymandering helping) and Falcon/PPT.  At this point I see it difficult that the opposition will get 15 of these 31 seats.  But September is still almost 5 months away.

The next assembly will be a mosaic of parties in front of a monolithic and likely radicalized chavismo.  Whether this one gets a majority or not, its cohesion will play havoc with the already rough managing of most parliaments.  To overcome this handicap it would be good for the opposition to get 20 of these 31 battle ground seats.

Primero Justicia seems to get the short end compared to AD and UNT.  In my opinion PJ got more difficult seats than these two.  AD benefits from several "list vote" safe sets, often the only seats that the opposition can win in those rural states.  And UNT gets a boost from Zulia who I think will punish Chavez seriously this time around. In other words, the better the polls for the opposition the better off will be PJ who could more than double its seats, a probability denied to the other guys.