Melbourne mainstream media daily The Age is emerging as a major determinant of the outcome of the 26 November Victorian state election, an exclusive Bug poll has revealed.

The Nine Entertainment Co. masthead has gained enormous ground and is now almost neck-and-neck with the Herald Sun when 1450 respondents to the Bug poll were asked to rate the reasons why Premier Daniel Andrews and his Labor government were set to win the election now only 13 days away by a Danslide, possibly even greater than in 2018.

In the Bug poll at the start of the campaign, voters put the Herald Sun (44 per cent) well ahead of The Age (28 per cent) and 3AW’s Neil Mitchell (17 per cent) as the main reasons Victorians were happily leaning towards an Andrews’ third term. The remaining 22 per cent gave other reasons or were undecided.

The latest Bug poll, taken from Wednesday to yesterday, showed the Herald Sun had slipped slightly to 41 percent, The Age had risen to 40, 3AW had dropped to 12, with those undecided or offering other factors such as Matthew Guy shrinking to a paltry 7 per cent.

Tim Read, from Revolting Political Manipulator who conducts such polls on behalf of The Bug, said the latest results had come as “quite a surprise”.

“I’m not sure how the Herald Sun could have gone backwards over just a few weeks, seeing they’ve given it their all with their revisiting of the car accident involving the Premier’s wife a decade ago and their fresh cooker-conspiracy theories about those stairs the Premier took a tumble down last year.

“It was all hysterical, unhinged, right-wing gobbledegook that should have offended decent Victorian electors and students of journalism everywhere and helped turn their thoughts even more towards voting Labor. I thought you could just about hear the stampede by voters to the left.

“Even Mitchell has gone backwards, despite throwing a spectacular hissy fit on air towards the end of the polling period when some ambulance bloke refused to agree with him about how awful Andrews and Labor were.

“Still, full credit to The Age. It’s becoming a force to be reckoned with when it comes to shaping public opinion, even if it’s entirely the opposite of what Nine Entertainment Co. chair Peter Costello would have been hoping for.”

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The MGH is indebted to highly respected and much admired former The Courier-Mail/Sunday Mail columnist Terry Sweetman for spotting the extract below. As Terry said in a tweet: New York Post demonstrates its encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian geography.