By Mark Pazniokas / CTMirror.org

Democrats Gov. Ned Lamont and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal held double-digit leads over Republicans Bob Stefanowski and Leora Levy in a Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters released Monday.

The new poll shows the incumbents with identical leads of 56 to 41 percent over their challengers in the Nov. elections, results that have changed little since Quinnipiac’s first survey of likely voters a month ago.

The survey of 1,879 likely voters was conducted from Wednesday through Sunday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. It was conducted by live interviews on landlines and cell phones.

The one promising finding for Stefanowski and Levy is their single-digit leads among unaffiliated voters, the largest bloc of voters by registration in Connecticut, though not necessarily by turnout.

Lamont and Blumenthal had strong approval ratings, while President Joe Biden was under water: 48 percent approved, and 49 percent disapproved. Thirty percent of likely voters had a favorable opinion of Donald Trump, while 62 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

Connecticut has not seen a double-digit win in a gubernatorial race since 2006, when Gov. M. Jodi Rell won a full term by a landslide after taking office in 2004 after the resignation of Republican John G. Rowland, who was convicted on federal corruption charges.

Lamont beat Stefanowski by 3.2 percentage points in 2018. His predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy, won by half a point in 2010 and 2.1 points in 2014.

The Levy campaign questioned the reliability of the Quinnipiac poll, although the polling site, FiveThirtyEight, gives the poll an accuracy rating of A-. The rating is based on how closely polls in the final 21 days of a race reflect the actual results.

Stefanowski has said his internal polling showed Lamont with a single-digit lead.

“Our internal polls and feedback from the public show a different race,” Stefanowski said.

Four years ago, Quinnipiac found Lamont with an 8-point lead among likely voters on Oct. 10 and a 4-point lead on Oct. 30, when the poll’s director, Douglas Schwartz, pronounced the race “too close to call.”

The same year in the same polls, Quinnipiac found U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy with a 15-point lead over Republican Matthew Corey. Murphy won by 20 percentage points.