GOV. MAURA HEALEY remains a strong favorite to win a second term in November as her Republican challenger, Mike Minogue, struggles to break through to a sizable chunk of voters and as President Trump’s unpopularity colors public sentiment in permanent ink.

If the election were held today, 54 percent of likely voters would pick Healey or lean in that direction, and 32 percent would pick Minogue, according to a new CommonWealth Beacon/MassINC Polling Group survey (Toplines | Crosstabs).

For all of the money Minogue has splashed on the contest — he’s contributed more than $15 million to his campaign so far — the former Abiomed executive does not seem to be reaching all voters less than two months away from Election Day. Twenty-seven percent of respondents still haven’t made up their mind about Minogue, and 16 percent said they have never heard of him. Even among Republican voters, only about half view their party’s nominee for the corner office favorably.

Perhaps most crucially, Minogue has yet to win over many independent voters not registered under a party label — the largest chunk of the electorate, and one that any Republican challenger needs to tap to find success in a state dominated by Democrats.

Minogue is underwater with a net favorability rating of minus 12 points among unenrolled or third-party voters, according to the poll. Nearly 45 percent of those voters either don’t know who Minogue is or have not decided how they feel about him.

Healey, by comparison, fares much better with independents, with her favorability netting out five points in the black among that subset. Overall, 52 percent of respondents rated Healey favorably and 33 percent rated her unfavorably.

The latest poll, which involved 800 likely voters contacted between September 14 and September 22 and has a credibility interval of 4 percentage points, is a more encouraging assessment for Healey than another MassINC Polling Group survey published in May. That poll put the governor’s net favorability rating at minus 6 points. That poll involved all registered voters, not just likely voters, which is a group typically a bit less favorable to Democratic candidates. There has also been a significant amount of campaigning since then, which may have influenced voter leanings.

With partisan polarization now a nearly inescapable fact of life, Trump remains an influential figure in the gubernatorial race — a dynamic Healey and the state Democratic Party have energetically sought to exploit, often pitching Minogue as an enabler of the president and Healey as a bulwark against his reach. The party has dubbed him “MAGA Mike,” and invoked the moniker continually.

It’s not hard to see why Democrats are eager to tie Minogue to Trump. Only 25 percent of Bay State likely voters view the president favorably, while 67 percent see him unfavorably, according to the new poll. More than a third of voters said they support Healey as a means to oppose Trump; in fact, independent voters were more likely than Democrats to view their vote for Healey as an anti-Trump maneuver.

One respondent, an independent woman who lives in Lynn, described her top priorities in the election as “finding voices that aren’t afraid to go against Trump’s wishes — voices in his party as well as Democrats.”

Another woman, a Democrat who lives in Woods Hole, similarly said her main focus in the election is both “the cost of living” and voting “for anyone who speaks out against Trump/MAGA.”

Healey for most of her first term has styled herself as a moderate Democrat, often echoing her popular Republican predecessor, Charlie Baker. Her approach at times has irked progressive activists, who wanted the chief executive of such a blue state to be more unabashedly left wing.

Yet the new poll finds that Democratic voters are mostly satisfied. Healey’s favorability rating among Democrats (+73 points) is nearly the same as that of progressive darling Ed Markey (+70 points), who just fended off a US Senate primary challenge from the more moderate US Rep. Seth Moulton. (Like Healey, Markey is cruising in his reelection bid. Fifty-four percent of voters say they’d pick him or lean that way if the election were today, compared to 28 percent who back Republican nominee John Deaton.)

Pollsters asked Healey supporters to explain why they intend to vote for her. The most common answer, offered 54 percent of the time, was “I think she has done a good job,” followed by 40 percent who “agree with her policy positions.” That wasn’t the case for Minogue backers, who were most likely to name their chief reason for picking the Republican candidate as “to oppose Maura Healey.”

Still, support for the governor has not widely translated into a clear consensus about what she has done well in her first four years. In June, a poll by Suffolk University and The Boston Globe found that more than half of voters could not identify a signature accomplishment for Healey.

Voters were pretty split about Healey’s top accomplishments in the new CommonWealth Beacon survey, too. The most common answer, health care, drew only 30 percent of respondents. Twenty-one percent, when offered a list of issues, answered “none of the above.”

There’s much more consensus about Healey’s shortcomings. About six in 10 voters said she has been least successful in addressing the state’s overall cost of living, and nearly half said she is struggling to tackle housing costs.

However, that might be less a reflection on Healey as an individual officeholder than a snapshot of the broader climate. Ask any politician what they’re hearing most from constituents: affordability concerns are as inescapable as Cape traffic on a summer weekend.

Indeed, inflation and the cost of living were the most common answers when voters were asked to use their own words to describe their top priorities in November’s election. For MassINC Polling Group president Steve Koczela, that’s nothing new.

“We see it on every single poll we do,” he said. “No matter of whom and about what, it goes costs and housing as [issues number] one and two.”