A Democratic candidate running for a state Senate seat in Johnson County released a poll this week purporting to show her ahead by three points over the Republican incumbent. But the poll can also be read as suggesting there are a lot of voters in Kansas who simply don’t eat, breathe and drink politics the way others do.

Vicki Hiatt is challenging Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, R-Shawnee, in the 10th District of northeast Johnson County. The poll was conducted by a national Democratic firm, North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, and the top-line numbers show Hiatt ahead, 43-40 percent, with 17 percent not sure.

The survey of 500 voters in the district was conducted Aug. 9-21. The material Hiatt released did not report a margin of error, but a poll of that size would typically be accurate within 4.5 percentage points in either direction, which would make the race a statistical dead heat.

There are several lists floating around in political and media circles that identify Senate districts where Democrats stand a fighting chance of taking seats away from Republicans. Most of those stop short of including the 10th District, which Pilcher-Cook won with 58 percent of the vote in 2012, and 55 percent in 2008.

But a look at some of the other numbers Hiatt released to the media paint an interesting picture of the voters in that district, one that is probably not very different from voters in any other district.

For example, only 30 percent of the people surveyed said they have a favorable opinion of Pilcher-Cook while 33 percent have an unfavorable opinion, and 37 percent said they weren’t sure.

People can say what they will about Pilcher-Cook, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who knows her not having an opinion one way or the other. She is a two-term incumbent and, some would say, quite possibly the most polarizing figure in the Kansas Senate.

One of her most notable acts in the Senate came in 2014 when she used her Public Health and Welfare Committee to conduct live ultrasounds of pregnant women on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide. She later lost her chairmanship of that committee amid a political fight this year with Senate President Susan Wagle.

Pilcher-Cook was also the only member of the Kansas Senate to vote no on a school funding bill during the special session in June that ultimately prevented the Kansas Supreme Court from closing public schools this year.

But if people in the 10th District don’t know much about Pilcher-Cook, they apparently know even less about Vicki Hiatt: 79 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t know enough about Hiatt to form an opinion of her.

Possibly the most interesting number from the poll, though, concerned the last presidential race in 2012. These questions fascinate political scientists who use the term “retrospective voting” because it asks people to think back and recall whom they voted for in some past election.

True to form, 11 percent of the people in this poll said they couldn’t remember whom they voted for in the last presidential race; only 49 percent of those surveyed said they voted for Republican Mitt Romney, and 40 percent said they voted for President Barack Obama.

Those numbers are particularly odd because Romney carried the 10th District, 57-41 percent over Obama, so either PPP under-sampled Republican voters (which the firm is not known for doing), or a whole lot of people who claim to remember how they voted really don’t remember.

“Another reminder that politics doesn’t matter that much to some people, even some who vote,” said University of Kansas political science professor Patrick Miller. “Another thing that you tend to see is that people tend to over-report voting for the winner, even in states that the winner lost.”

Looking ahead to this year’s presidential race, however, the PPP survey showed there is reason to think Republican candidates could under-perform in the 10th District. It shows Republican Donald Trump ahead of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the district, but only by six points, 45-39 percent.

Looking at past presidential races, any given Democrat can win 40 percent of the vote in the 10th District. That’s also generally true of Kansas as a whole. But each of the last two Republican candidates won more than 50 percent in the 10th District: 57 percent for Romney; 53 percent for Sen. John McCain in 2008.

In presidential election years, the top of the ballot is what drives voter turnout. So the fact that Trump is polling at just 45 percent in the district, while Clinton is showing up about as expected, could indicate that GOP voters there aren’t terribly excited about this election.

If that trend holds through November, it would not be helpful for other Republican candidates like Pilcher-Cook further down the ballot.