Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date Nan­cy Boy­da claims that a poll puts her ahead of incum­bent Jim Ryun:

The poll showed 42.5 per­cent favored Boy­da; 41.2 per­cent favored Ryun and 16.2 per­cent were unde­cid­ed. The poll’s mar­gin of error was plus or minus 4.6 percent.

The sam­ple was from vot­er rolls, and the poll was run by a local poll­ster who is han­dling oth­er cam­paign work. Noth­ing unusu­al there.

The point here is not that Boy­da is nec­es­sar­i­ly actu­al­ly ahead. Cam­paign polls are only periph­er­al­ly intend­ed to tell the can­di­dates who is win­ning over all. A good cam­paign poll ought to be accu­rate, of course, but with such a small sam­ple size, the inter­est is more in how spe­cif­ic groups or areas are respond­ing to the cam­paign and its mes­sage. Smart cam­paigns do lots of polls like this. And in a ran­dom sam­ple of a lot of polls, you can get a fluke. That’s why, on its own, this announce­ment does­n’t tell us a lot

What’s almost more inter­est­ing is Ryun’s response. If his inter­nal polling put him well out of Boy­da’s reach, that’s all he’d say. He’d release a poll that put him up by the 15 points he won by last time, and put this to bed. Instead the Ryun peo­ple just point to a hit piece they plant­ed in the Star a few days ago. Yes, Boy­da is run­ning an out­side the Belt­way cam­paign. She was say­ing that in the win­ter. It isn’t news, and it isn’t sur­pris­ing. Kansas is pret­ty far from DC, and appar­ent­ly from Jim Ryun. Boy­da did­n’t ask for DCCC help, nor for back­ing from the big PACs. She’s run­ning a grass­roots cam­paign, and that’s praiseworthy.

This will be a tough race. When he was younger, Jim Ryun made his name blow­ing his com­pe­ti­tion away. These days, it seems like he’s tak­en up jog­ging. He’s skip­ping can­di­date fora, flip-flop­ping on debates, and not real­ly governing.

You can drop a cou­ple dol­lars on Nan­cy Boy­da to help her on her way.