We don’t even need to ditch the electoral college, but "just" get the states to more proportionately assign their electors, as Nebraska and Maine have done. But good luck with that, too. Can you imagine trying to convince, for example, California to proportionally allocate their 54 votes in this political climate and give Trump 40%?
If everyone else (and specifically Texas) went proportional, then why not. Until then, CA changing the votes would be a massive give-away to Republicans.
BTW, people are overlooking that Nebraska doesn't allocate proportionally, they allocate the votes according to the outcome of each congressional district, which are probably gerrymandered. The overall winner gets the 2 votes for the senate seats.
You'd probably need a critical mass of states to agree to do it at the same time; as you say it would ~never make sense for a state to be the _first_ (or, well, first big state) to do this.
