To sustain the momentum, Santorum’s campaign is scrambling to devise a strategy that allows it to compete with Romney’s deep-pocketed, well-oiled machine as 10 states head to the polls on Super Tuesday, March 6. “We learned a lot from trying to ramp up quickly after Iowa,” says Mike Biundo, Santorum’s campaign manager. “We didn’t have the bandwidth at that point to run the kind of campaign we needed.” The campaign is weighing how to spread its cash across the multiple states, and is likely to target conservative states — including Georgia, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Idaho and Tennessee — where it hopes to avoid costly air wars.

The plum prize, of course, is the Michigan primary on Feb. 28. A victory in Romney’s home state would be an embarrassment for Romney and would dispel what aura of inevitability the front-runner has left. Santorum’s team, which is leery of the polls showing their man up by around 10 points, is cautious about investing heavily in a state where they could get trounced. But even the specter of an upset has spooked the former Massachusetts governor. “Romney must be having nightmares,” says Bill Ballenger, a Michigan political analyst. “I’ve never seen other candidates do well with so little as Romney’s opponents. And it’s simply because they’re not Romney. If he loses Michigan, it may be the final impetus that would get the Karl Roves and the super PACs together to say, enough of this. It would be devastating.”