Perhaps. It's comfortable that way...but the problem with all of the polls is there is something (or several somethings) odd happening for which there is no model. Frankly, we won't be able to determine an accurate model without the benefit of hindsight.
Is the last 5-6% of Bush support really soft? Is there 4% of the electorate that didn't vote before that is going to vote Republican? ...there's a 10% uncertainty right there, quite aside from peoples moods on election day.
Different polls are using different turnout models...and the key IS going to be turnout. We can say this poll or that poll is accurately polling, but are they properly predicting turnout? That we won't know until after the election.
The electoral college predictions are what is important, not the polls.
Every poll has a degree of uncertainty built in. That's why I think that it is better to rely on poll averages rather than individual polls.
As for how hard or soft President Bush's support is, Democracy Corp (James Carville's firm) did a study following the first debate. They found that Bush's hard support is at 48%, while Kerry's was at 46%. For both candidates, only 2% of respondents said that there was even a "fair" chance that they might change their minds. This finding ties in with what Matthew Dowd (Bush's pollster) had been saying after the first debate, which is that he thinks the President has a 2-3 point lead nationally.
I have said this many times, but my personal opinion, based on historical data that Gallup put out about a month or so ago, is that the President's job approval rating, even more than the topline numbers, is the single best predictor of his election day vote. Right now the poll average of Bush's job approval rating is in the low 50s, which is good enough to win nationally by 4-6 points. If you think about it, the overwhelming number of people who will actually vote for the President (including leaners) will conclude that his job performance is good enough to deserve re-election. The overwhelming number of Kerry voters (including leaners) will believe that his job performance is not good enough to deserve re-election.