(h/t: warner)

A Decision Analyst poll of Texas voters released today shows a 14-point lead for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.  It’s an outlier, to be sure, but I’d wager it’ll come closer to the final result than any poll released thus far.  At any rate, no matter which poll you look at– and keeping in mind that we’re still 11 days away from the primary– the trendlines in Texas don’t look good for Clinton:

The reality is that even if Clinton finds a way to hold on and win Texas, she would have to win by a substantial margin to even begin closing the delegate gap on Obama.  And because of the complicated delegate allocations of Texas’s primary/caucus system, Clinton could win the popular vote and still lose the delegate count.

But I don’t think it will come to any of that.  I think we’ll see in Texas and Ohio the same thing we’ve been seeing for the past two weeks.  Wherever the poll numbers are a week before the primary, they’ll swing a good 15 to 20 points in Obama’s direction by election day, thanks to unaccounted for surges in African-American, Independent, and first-time voters.  Ohio may be close, but I’ll be surprised if Obama doesn’t win Texas by double digits.

(Full disclosure: Truthfully, the entire purpose of this post is so I could write the headline “Houston, she has a problem.”)

UPDATE: Commenter warner is all over the links, and provides a great one to a Houston Chronicle article that shows early voter turnout in Texas up 2 to 3 times what it was in 2004 in Clinton-friendly areas such as El Paso and Corpus Christi, but up between 5 and 10 times the 2004 numbers in Obama-friendly areas such as Dallas and Austin.  Their prediction based on early voter turnout: “The same factors that carried the last 10 states for Obama will carry Texas.”