Nearly a year out from the 2016 elections, every day seems to bring a new poll of who's up and who's down. In recent months, this has helped determine who gets a national platform at the Republican debates; which candidates get more media coverage; and which may get a fundraising edge. Just one problem: Over the past several years, polling has proved less and less accurate in predicting the actual outcome of elections.

Nearly a year out from the 2016 elections, every day seems to bring a new poll of who�s up and who�s down.

In recent months, this has helped determine who gets a national platform at the Republican debates; which candidates get more media coverage; and which may get a fundraising edge.

Just one problem: Over the past several years, polling has proved less and less accurate in predicting the actual outcome of elections. In addition to the notoriously unreliable indication that early primary and caucus polls give on elections, pollsters themselves say that changes in technology and behavior have made it difficult to get an accurate read on voters.

Michael Curtin, now a Democratic state representative from Marble Cliff, was a longtime journalist who presided over The Dispatch�s poll, conducted by mail ahead of elections and well-regarded for its accuracy, in the 1980s and 1990s. Curtin attributes today�s polling woes to several key factors.

�Technology � everyone has a cellphone now,� Curtin said. �The ubiquity of unwanted phone calls. Telemarketing kind of ruined the polling business; people just stopped answering the phone ... and we�re in a hyper-partisan age, where people are suspicious of who�s calling them and why.�

Societal and technological changes are adopted most quickly among young people, meaning they are more likely to be underrepresented in phone polls. Conversely, young people and other voting blocs that typically skew Democratic may be overrepresented in online polling.

An overall decline in respondents coupled with underrepresentation of particular groups can lead to suspect poll results. In September, Bloomberg News reported that a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey of the Republican race �represents the preferences of only 230 likely GOP voters. Analysis of certain subgroups, like evangelicals, could be shaped by the response of a single voter.�

Polling always has been part science, part art, but the old ways of massaging the numbers to represent the general electorate often no longer work. These same forces have been seen in elections around the world in just the past year; a polling inquiry panel was formed by the British Polling Council, after polling for the May re-election bid of Prime Minister David Cameron proved woefully off. One member of the panel noted that �Electorates are more volatile. They are de-aligned from parties.�

In June, a New York Times article asked: �What's the Matter With Polling?� It described election polling as being �in near crisis� in the face of the cellphone revolution and the unwillingness of people to take part in surveys. This year�s annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research featured sessions with titles such as �Cell Phone Multiplicity: Should Polls Correct for Adults with More than One Cell Phone?� and �How Can We Produce Estimates When We Can�t Call You?: Revisiting Keeter�s Method to Adjust for the Phoneless Population.�

Candidates, media outlets and other groups aren�t going to stop using polling. As in every business sector, marketing research drives decisions and helps determine where money and resources are allocated. So how to fix it? Ironically, Curtin says it ultimately might be going back to the future.

�Polling really began household to household,� Curtin said. �I think the future of polling might depend on going household to household again. If polls were run for methodological purity rather than based on cost, that�s the way they�d all be done today.�