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My best result so far is 23 votes. I had barely any Emotion apart from like 10 allure from snake, but maxed out Interaction and relied on etiquette+rhetorics for checks. No blackmail and no insulting/menacing anyone, having 0 menace helped with that since it seems it sometimes triggers automatically otherwise. This resulted in zero assassination attempts and by the end all electors apart from Lukomir felt positive about Zorana although not everyone voted for her. This is now my go-to formula, Interaction plus different skils each time to do different quests for votes (they're fun to do!). Although I might try a run with high Emotions/ Menace just out of curiosity, maybe I'll finally get an assasin :D

My go-to skills are a mix of what's useful in-game and what makes sense narratively. 

Interaction skills are a must every playthrough no matter what else I'm focusing on, they're just too useful and it makes sense for an empress candidate to study them.

I feel like Kxenia and Vasily's lessons are a hint that those two skill groups are useful. At first I studied Art only beause it's an interest of Zorana's friend but it comes in handy. So does Spaceship and since Zorana lives on one it makes sense she'd learn a thing or two. Engineering and Condition are also useful, and surprisingly Hunting. In early game I easily got three votes with Demolition 50, Hunting 30 and Piloting 40.

The Knowledge skils are useful in many checks plus the movement and social turn bonus, so at first I'd raise them before getting an advisor, with the reasoning that if Zorana and advisor both have 50 Bureaucracy then it's 100 in total. It wasn't until I read a post on this forum that I learned that checks don't take the sum of values but take the higher one. My jaw dropped, I was convinced they sum up. I've since reread the in-game info and in hindsight can kinda tell which part is supposed to hint at this but the phrasing was too circumspect for me and flew over my head. Now that I know I barely touch these skills since checks will be taking the advisor's value anyway unless I specialize so anything over 20 feels like a waste of class.

As for Emotions, on my first playthrough I didn't know what Empathy is used for and didn't touch it, then was flooded with multiple 'you can't tell how she feels about you', 'you can't tell if he's telling the truth', and I instantly fell in love with the game <3 This is basically my everyday life with autism so I was instantly immersed and relating to Zorana. I later found that Empathy isn't as necessary as it seems, since having it at 0 doesn't seem to affect votes and you can get opinions via poll. Allure and Menace seem to be used for Charm and Blackmail which I don't use anyway, so I tend to leave this group alone or with minimal points. Failed some checks but nothing disastrous so far.

It took me a while to figure out the mechanics behind how exactly the mood wheel functions so I'll type it down in case someone finds this useful. Or corrects me if I got something wrong :D

The mood wheel shows up at the end of every social turn and will always offer two mood-altering activities. The key part is that it selects those activities by looking at your current mood and always offers to switch to one of your mood's immediate neighbors. So let's say you have the blob pet and visit it during the social turn, which sets your mood to Negative, then you end the social turn. The mood wheel will show that your current mood is Negative and will offer to switch to either Cautious (on its left) or Secretive (on its right). Let's say you pick Secretive and play on, as long as your mood doesn't change during the narrative scenes and the social turn you can choose between Negative and Determined next turn. It's theoreticaly possible to travel the whole wheel like that. 

Keeping this in mind helps with planning out bonuses for classes, or for entire playthroughs - for example, if you want to focus on maxing out Stealth this playthrough it's best to pick the blob pet, since Stealth is boosted by Cautious and Secretive and you can force the wheel to offer those every time by visiting blob before the social turn ends. In practice it's a bit more complicated since some narrative scenes can alter your mood before classes so it's not a surefire method, and sometimes you don't have the turn to spare to visit your pet, but it's still really handy.

Thanks for this! I couldn't figure out why I failed a Rhetoric + Allure : Student check with Rhetoric 40 (with outfit) and Allure 10. Guess this particular check was asking for 60 points total. I had the misguided idea that it just wanted one of the categories to be Student level haha... Now I wonder if the split matters and the result would be the same for Rhetoric 50 +Allure 10 as for Rhetoric 30 + Allure 30.