Nope, the rules cannot be changed in the middle of the contest. Donald Trump campaigned under the premise that the electoral vote tally is what determines the presidential victor, just as he should have. If the popular vote determined the winner, he would have campaigned in Texas to drive up his margin of victory there, and he would have campaigned in California to drive down the margin of his loss there. It is very possible that he would have thus garnered the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote. I would prefer to see the electoral voting method continue in future elections, but if it is ever changed to a simple popular vote, such a change must be fully implemented BEFORE the election.
They aren't trying to get the rules changed. They are trying to get Trump electors to flip. It's not going to happen.
Hellary didn’t win the popular vote, either. I’ve been looking for info about how many votes may have been cast by illegal aliens, felons, and dead people, and it appears to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5M to 2M. Since at least 75% of those people would have voted for Hitlery, that reduces her total by at least 1.1M votes, making her total less than President-elect Trump’s.
Trump this year accomplished what Gore attempted in 2000. In that election, going down to the wire, Bush held a small but durable national lead in virtually all the public polling. Gore's hopes lay in winning a handful of big states to tip the Electoral College his way. In the final weeks, the race appeared to depend on, if I recall correctly, Florida and two other states. Democrats talked incessantly about the primacy of the Electoral College, that most brilliant of inventions by the constitutional convention.
Everything flipped at the end for two reasons. The first was the late hit on Bush's 30 year old DUI, which dominated the news in the last 72 hours. The second was the networks' early call of Florida for Gore, announced while the polls were open in the panhandle. That cost Bush several thousand votes in Florida (had this not happened, the recount fiasco would never have taken place). It probably cost Bush the national popular vote lead as well, as the bad call in Florida was not retracted for a couple of hours; this was during prime voting hours in the mountain and western time zones, where voters all believed Gore had already won.
Gore emerged with the popular vote majority. Democrats popped everything they had been saying about the Electoral College down the memory hole. I'm sure Trump's win will reinforce their calls for abolishing the EC.
You are of course correct that without the EC, the strategies of the campaigns would be entirely different. Democrats are making a very careless assumption when they argue that their popular vote lead would persist under the new rules.
But in addition, the Electoral College is a vital limitation on vote fraud. It compartmentalizes corruption. The margins in most of the states are outside the limits of fraud; we need only be concerned about a handful of very close states in a disputed election. If we eliminated the EC, the opportunity and incentive for fraud would increase exponentially, and every recount would have to be conducted nationally. Imagine the 2000 Florida recount if Republicans went vote mining in Nebraska and Georgia to offset Democrat vote mining in four counties in Florida while the Democrats expanded their search to Philly, Chicago and Los Angeles. It was a nightmare as it was. Without the EC, the problems would have compounded massively.
Shrillary only went to 37 states-—which means that she didn’t go to 26% of the American states.
Trump went to 45 states.
When you don’t even have enough respect for voters to even visit their state AT LEAST ONCE-—then you deserve to lose...
Not that all of her other transgressions weren’t enough to kick her to the curb.