So suppose the initial race is too close to call, and you want to figure out for yourself what the trends are, rather than listen to Chris Matthews make up trends on the fly.  What to do?

Well, you're in luck.  The Texas Secretary of State, Election Division, has an excellent web site through which you can monitor returns.  You can find the Democratic returns here and the GOP returns here.

One point to notice is that 98% of the state is on Central time, and the polls in those places will close at 7:00 CST, 8:00 EST.  The only exception is El Paso, which is on Mountain Time, and where the polls will take an extra hour to close.  In times past the Election Division has released results prior to the polls closing in El Paso.  However, even if this does not occur, it is possible for individual counties to release results early.  Here is a list of county election sites for some of the largest counties:

Harris County (Houston)
Dallas County
Tarrant County (Fort Worth)
Bexar County (San Antonio)
Travis County (Austin)

In particular, the Travis County site indicates that results will be available as soon as possible after 7pm, i.e. after polls close there, not statewide.

What can you find out from these sites, and how will results come out?

1) Texas has historically been very good at getting out the early return results very quickly.  These will be released before the regular election day returns.  The early raw numbers will be very large for the small number of percentage of precinct reporting, because it will have the numbers for early voting everywhere, in addition to the small number of precincts then reporting.

2) The Texas Secretary of State site will have reports broken down  by county.  This will give some perspective on which votes are still out there and which have already been counted.

What counties should be looked at closely?

a) Obama has to carry huge majorities in Travis (Austin) and Dallas Counties in order to win.  He should also carry Harris County (Houston), but Harris is probably a bit less of his territory than Travis or Austin are.  Harris County has many more blue collar workers and more Asians than either Dallas or Travis, and these populations have not gone so much towards Obama.

b) The biggest Hispanic counties are El Paso, Cameron, Hidalgo, Webb, and Nueces.  El Paso and Cameron Counties however have large universities, so if you want to get a strong read on just the Hispanic Vote, watch Hidalgo , Webb, and Nueces.

c) There aren't too many blue collar white Democrats left in Texas, but they are there, and they are primarily concentrated in the coastal area from Houston to the Louisiana border.  For this vote, watch Chambers, Orange, and especially Jefferson County.

d) The suburban vote in Texas has been historically very Republican, but current early voting totals indicate that this might be changing.  For this segment, watch Collin and Denton (suburban Dallas), Montgomery and Fort Bend (suburban Houston), and Willamson and Hays (suburban Austin).