Forgot to add planting trees and other vegetation in your yard will make a big difference even when they are young and small. Going from my house with some older trees to a friends that has no trees makes 10-15F difference. There are all kinds of other benefits but I will spare you until earth day rolls around 
Old trick was to remove the return side door of the furnace to pull cooler basement air in the fan. We installed a separate toggle switch for manual fan use. Some owners would damper off unused rooms. Like said above though, there were diminishing returns once the basement air warmed up. As every house was different, YMMV. Prolly OK for milder weather but not the height of summer.
fasted58 wrote: Old trick was to remove the return side door of the furnace to pull cooler basement air in the fan. We installed a separate toggle switch for manual fan use.
We use that trick in the spring and fall. Didn't have to use a separate switch, there is one built into our thermostat. We frequently run the fan manually so that the electronic air cleaner in the furnace ductwork will function.
Oh man. Monkeying with the return circuit of the existing ductwork sounds like a damn simple way to accomplish exactly what I'm after. Genius!
Man I don't know how some of you guys do it without A/C. I guess growing up without it you'd be okay but growing up in Sebring, Fl and it just being plain hot and muggy all the time - I f'ing love my A/C. Plus half of my family are HVAC fabricators - I'll ask their input on this for you and be back in a couple of days with a response.
I grew up without A/C in South Carolina. I'll never go without it again.
Yowza, SC in August with no A/C would be a miserable place. Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called 'Shopping for Death' where 92 degreess was considered the perfect temperature to trigger a murder and a longshoreman bore that hypothesis out. Having been raised in the steamy hot sticky dead still South, I can sorta understand where the bad guy was coming from.
I did this in a rental band house c. 1982. Installed a removable "door" in the return air plenum above the furnace/air handler in the (cool) basement. Blocked off some of the returns in the (hot) upstairs. Redistribute the air. Happy, cool bandmates who got more sleep.
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