If Hillary Clinton wants to kickstart a comeback, she needs to win Texas on March 4. But don't take it from me. Just ask her most devoted surrogate--some guy named Bill Clinton. "If she wins Texas and Ohio, I think she will be the nominee," the former prez told a crowd in Beaumont on Wednesday. "If you don't deliver for her, I don't think she can be. It's all on you."

Unfortunately, her standing in the Lone Star State is getting shakier by the day.

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that Clinton would need to win by 20 or 30 points in every March 4 state to close the gap of 150+ pledged delegates separating her from Barack Obama; disregard, too, Texas's odd allocation rules, which might force her to capture as much as 55 percent of the state's vote just to break even in terms of delegates. In this case, a win would be a win--and it would instantly change the national narrative from "Frontrunner Obama" to "Clinton Is Back." It's just that even a popular-vote victory is no better than a 50-50 chance at this point. Not only has Obama cut her lead from about 10 points around Valentine's Day to an average of 2.8 percent today--check out this chart for the visual--but three less spectacular (if no less significant) early indicators have surfaced in the past 48 hours that may show the state drifting in the Illinois senator's direction.

1) Money: After raising $36 million in January--or more than $1 million a day--the Obama campaign is now on track to rake in a whopping $50 million or more this month. Republican math whiz Patrick Ruffini notes that Obama "had tallied about 256,000 donors for the year as of the end of January," and that those donors contributed an average of $140 each (hence the $36 mil). Applying that same per-person average to February's 327,000 donors "would give Obama just over $46 million in 21 days"--and at least $60 million for the quarter. In comparison, Clinton raised only $13.5 million in January, and is expect to top out at $30 million this month. What does this have to do with Texas? A lot. For starters, it means that Obama is able to vastly outspend Clinton on the ground, dwarfing her $770,000 ad buy with a $1.25 million campaign of his own. (It's a similar story in Ohio, where his purchase doubles hers.) That's crucial in a state that's too large to fully cover in person. Secondly, the massive flood of small online contributions means that Obama can spend more time connecting to voters and less time gladhanding potential donors. As the New York Times writes, "Mr. Obama has done just a few traditional fund-raising events in January and none in February, in contrast to the Clinton campaign, which has been keeping up a steady diet of fund-raisers with either Mrs. Clinton or her husband, former President Bill Clinton." The more time Obama spends campaigning in a state, the better he does.

2) Early Voting: The good folks at Burnt Orange, a very smart blog on Texas politics, have put together a chart that plots "the stunning increase in Early Voting we saw Tuesday on the first day of voting in Texas" against the "percent Hispanic population per county, which is a crude proxy for support for Hillary." The result: "as the Hispanic population increases, the percent increase in voting lessens." Here it is (via Politico):

These results are extremely preliminary, and early voting won't decide the primary, but the numbers suggest that Obama, not Clinton, is leading the pre-primary derby there--and may also hint that voters in Obama-friendly areas of the state are more, ahem, "fired up and ready to go" (to the polls, at least) than those in regions expected to tilt toward Clinton. Not to mention the fact that the longer Hispanics hold out, the longer Obama has to win them over.

3) Black Turnout: In Texas, Latinos account for 35.7 percent of the population, while African-Americans make up only 11.9 percent. That's a three-to-one margin. But black voters typically show up on Election Day in numbers that exceed their overall share of the population, while Latinos have proven much harder to turn out--a gap that experts say might widen this year due to the excitement Obama's historic candidacy has generated in the African-American community. (His campaign's unprecedented GOTV machinery will help, too.) According to a report yesterday by John Moritz of McClatchy Newspapers, Obama supporter (and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk) is claiming "that blacks this year could account for 25 percent to 30 percent of the Democratic turnout." And neutral strategist Kelly Fero is raising the bar even higher: "It's plausible that African-American turnout could push north of 40 percent in the Democratic primary." Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign forecasted in a recent memo that Hispanic turnout would "surpass the 24 percent mark it reached in 2004." If those numbers hold--and Obama continues to win 85-90 percent of the black vote and trail Clinton by 20 or so among Hispanics--he's likely to finish seven to 10 points better on primary day, writes Moritz, than previous polling predicted. Assuming the race remains deadlocked up until March 4, that alone would be enough for a win.