After wrapping himself in the maple leaf, Carney needs Liberal support to stick like syrup

With 15 days left before election day, Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada continue to lead popular opinion polls.

CBC's Poll Tracker and 338canada.com, both of which aggregate the results of national polls, suggest the rookie Liberal leader and his once-woebegotten Grits retain a six-percentage-point lead over Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives as the party of choice for Canadians.

Both poll aggregators place Liberal support this week around 44 per cent, compared to 38 per cent for the Conservative.

This is remarkable in the context of recent Canadian elections. Polls suggest Carney's Liberals are more popular right now than Justin Trudeau's Liberals were on election night in 2015, when Trudeau won his sole majority government.

As a result, the same poll aggregators say if an election were held today, the Liberals would secure a large majority government, likely exceeding the size of Trudeau's majority 10 years ago. 

Given the inefficiency of Conservative Party support, which tends to be heavily concentrated in relatively few ridings, Liberals tend to win Canadian elections even when the two parties are tied in popular support.

"The important point for the Conservatives is even at that zero-point race, that tie, the Liberals probably still win more seats," CBC Poll Tracker's Eric Grenier said earlier this week on Power & Politics.

"Even in the worst polls for the Liberals and the best polls for the Conservatives, Mark Carney still comes out on top."

The question is whether the current political dynamic will hold.

In late March, when Carney called the election, Liberal support hovered around 38 per cent. Few political observers expected the Liberals' popularity to remain at that level, let alone grow.

"You have nowhere to go but down, but right now, Mark Carney hasn't gone down, and it's a bit of a surprise," said Mary Agnes Welch, a principal with Winnipeg's Probe Research.

There is a lot of pressure on Carney, given that he's running his first campaign as a politician and serving as a caretaker prime minister without any meaningful experience in either role.

"He is in many ways a political neophyte, so the fact that he hasn't stumbled badly is actually a bit of a miracle," Welch said.

"There's also this view that at some point we were all going to wake up and remember that we didn't like the Liberals very much two months ago — and that hasn't happened."