Could President Trump's stellar Mount Rushmore speech have maybe shifted his political fortunes? It was so good, so inspiring, so necessary in times like these. 

Looking back on the 2020 election, historians will say the Mt. Rushmore speech was the moment that Donald Trump won reelection.

...wrote the estimable Roger Kimball, in American Greatness, in the hours after the speech.

So it's natural to start looking for the upward turn in his poll numbers. Here's one that held some promise:

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Trump by 4 percentage points nationwide in a new Hill-HarrisX general election poll. 

Forty-three percent of registered voters said they would support Biden for president if the election were held today. 

By contrast, 39 percent of voters in the July 3-4 survey said the same of Trump.

Five percent of voters said they prefer someone else. An additional 5 percent of voters said they do not plan to vote in the election, one percentage point up from the same survey conducted last month.  

Eight percent of voters are still undecided, down a percentage point from last month. 

That's because poll after poll has shown that Biden was beating Trump by eight to 12 points. Four points would signal a shift, yes, maybe a lessening of the frozen negative ground, maybe a trend that is our friend? One poll, out of a lot of them, sure, but maybe the others would follow?

Unfortunately, maybe not. The Hill/Harris, while not a particularly pro-Trump pollster, reported two weeks earlier, in a poll taken June 22-23, before the speech, that Trump was operating at a four-point deficit, as well, meaning the needle remained unmoved as Trump gave his tremendous speech.

Worse still, according to RealClearPolitics' pollster scorecard, The Hill/Harris had Trump in a one-point deficit May 13-14, meaning Trump has declined.

More bad news? The betting parlors have Biden ahead, too, this week by an average of 18.6 points. A careful look at the chart on RealClearPolitics average shows that Trump lost his lead in Biden in early June, but on July 3, the day Trump gave the speech, Trump's odds of winning against Biden improved by about a point or two, not reaching positive territory, but going upward, before slipping back down into place on July 6.

Image credit: RealClearPolitics, fair use

That, sadly, was the bump from the speech.

Now all is not lost yet, but it signals that it's going to take more than a brilliant speech, which sends our hearts soaring, for President Trump to get this election down flat.

The deep state has done its damage. The House has put on a clown show. The deep-state medical establishment has proven its full politicization. The academic elites have done their work turning out ignorant low-information wokesters. Antifa and Black Lives Matter have literally mainstreamed Marxism -- and damaged rule of law. The blue-state mayors and governors have done maybe the most damage.

Because anecdotally, that seems to be where President Trump is taking the most blame. A look at Twitter has leftists and lo-fos most excited about the 134,000-person death count from COVID-19, a figure that now matches exactly the 134,000 death toll from 2003's SARS pandemic. (I had to do a double-take on those numbers from a Google search of "COVID-19 death toll" and "SARS death toll"). Obviously, one of these pandemics got a lot more attention than the other. The other problem is that unlike SARS, COVID-19 got an economic shutdown that killed millions of jobs, and that one can only hope a V-shaped recovery can restore. Trump is getting blamed for the 134,000 deaths, unfortunately, and worse still, they are largely the work of Democratic blue state governors who purposely seeded nursing homes with COVID patients, and have yet to accept or take blame for it.

Trump has got to find a way to get it across that blue state governors own this death toll, not Trump, who has been fast and constructive in the crisis as well as willing to listen to so-called experts and collaborate with others to get the job done. Since all of them have betrayed him, it's time to pin blame, since voters are pinning it on him.

He's also got to fight harder to get the economy opened so that the betting odds and more can be restored. People who are stuck in their homes, complaining about their masks, ignoring social distancing orders out of sheer weariness, don't make contented voters.

Here's another anecdotal area where voters are way off on the wrong track, too. I had a long conversation with a bright Florida voter, tech guy, hates Hugo Chavez, some interests in cops, lawyers and security -- who's voting for Joe Biden. He had voted for Trump in 2016, but he was adamant that Biden was the one, the moderate guy who would restore normalcy. Amd Trump was lousy on COVID, he said, without specifics. "You drank the Trump Kool-Aid," he told me. 

There are signs Trump is working in this direction, and one hopes there's enough time to get the job done.

Combine it with Democrat vote-rigging and the mass mail-in ballot scheme, with still no checks on illegals voting and it remains worrisome, particularly if the result is close.

On the plus side, the stock market's rise is a forward indicator, and it wouldn't be rising if there was a belief that the COVID-19 trouble wouldn't be over soon. Nor would it rise if it was betting on a Joe Biden win, at least, the Joe Biden we know.

There's also the enthusiasm factor. In recent primaries, Trump supporters, with just one candidate on the ballot, have turned out at a higher rate than Democrats. It's going to help. And Republican operatives should do all they can to lower turnout on the Democrat side. A good economy is a start, meaning, skip the stimulus checks and disincentives to work which will only prolong the depression. There's also the high risk that Democrats, with Joe Biden their frontsman, will make some mistakes. Big mistakes.

There's also the swing state/electoral college factor. Trump only needs to win based on the electoral college count, not the full popular tally, which is why swing states are important. We're not there yes, but it's not as big a task.

There's also the stubborn professor, remember him? who insists that by his model, Trump has a 91% chance of being re-elected. His model has gotten elections right since primaries were held more than a hundred years ago, with two exceptions, 1960 and 2000 (both elections of which were plagued by accusations of fraud). Could the professor be right? Well, for now, his model shows that conditions are still there to say that Trump's re-election is winnable.