The Santorum camp hopes for a win in Romney's native state of Michigan. | AP Photos Santorum's plan to derail Romney

Rick Santorum’s campaign is eyeing a pair of swiftly approaching Midwestern primary states as its best — and perhaps only — opportunity to deal a mortal blow to Mitt Romney and permanently transform the Republican presidential race into a one-on-one duel to the finish.

Nearly a week after upsetting Romney in the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses and the Missouri primary, both Santorum and his aides say they remain focused on a state-by-state, delegate-by-delegate grind toward the GOP nomination. With Santorum looking increasingly like the last down-the-line conservative standing in the 2012 field, his team sees plentiful opportunities to harvest delegates over the next month in states such as North Dakota, Oklahoma and Kansas — inexpensive political arenas that lean strongly to the right.


But in candid conversations with POLITICO, a half-dozen Santorum strategists and allies indicated that the former Pennsylvania senator is weighing whether to seek a more dramatic shift in a primary season that has seen plenty of them.

A potential path to breaking open the race against Romney, they say, could run through Michigan’s Feb. 28 election and Ohio’s Super Tuesday vote on March 6 — two Rust Belt primaries in which they believe Santorum’s working-class background and manufacturing-heavy message will resonate. (Arizona’s winner-take-all primary, also on Feb. 28, looks less inviting.)

The privately held hope in the Santorum camp is that beating Romney in his native state of Michigan or in the ultimate general election battleground of Ohio would discredit, on a grand scale, the on-and-off Republican front-runner and make the other candidates in the race irrelevant in the remaining contests.

“If we can get it to a two-person race, I feel very confident that we will be the nominee,” said Santorum strategist John Brabender, who explained that the campaign is assessing where to play based on the number of delegates at stake and the cost of competing in each state.

Brabender said final decisions haven’t been made about how heavily to contest Michigan, Ohio and other costly upcoming primaries, but called those states fertile ground for his candidate.

“We’ll be the first to admit that if it’s a state where moderates do very well, that Mitt Romney will do well. … If it’s a state where conservatives and tea party candidates do well, we’ll play in those states,” he said. “A state like Michigan, a state like Ohio, you do look at those and say, Santorum’s blue-collar background versus Romney’s Wall Street background, we believe is a great contrast to have.”

Santorum himself went a bit further in a Fox News interview last week, saying he believed he could beat Romney in Michigan, though Romney won the state in 2008 and grew up there when his father, George Romney, was governor.

And even as they work to lay the foundation for a longer struggle against Romney, Santorum’s team has already taken tentative steps toward a more aggressive posture in Michigan and Ohio.

They’ve brought on state directors in both states, plus Tennessee. A media-buying source said Santorum has inquired about cable television rates in Ohio and aides to the former senator said they are preparing to run ads there and in Michigan.

Santorum campaign manager Mike Biundo said he expects to spend much of his time in the coming weeks based out of Columbus, Ohio, while maintaining a presence in Michigan. The candidate is scheduled to speak at the Detroit Economic Club and address the Oakland County, Mich., GOP on Thursday.

Asked whether Santorum is girding for a long war against Romney or plans to seek a decisive turn of momentum, Biundo answered: “A combination of both.”

“We’re a little bit more nimble than Mitt’s campaign, so we’ve been able to pick our spots. … There’s a lot of target-rich environments where we can pick up delegates,” Biundo said, adding, “If there’s a chance to take Mitt out, we’ll do it.”

Neither Santorum’s campaign nor the super PAC supporting him is ready to commit fully to a go-for-the-throat strategy against Romney in Michigan and Ohio. In many respects, the safest way forward for Santorum is to keep his attention on states like the ones he has already taken: conservative, cheap, low-turnout contests where a good part of victory is just showing up.

More than a few of the Super Tuesday states fit that bill: Santorum campaigned last week in Oklahoma and is scheduled to visit Idaho and North Dakota in the next few days. Should Santorum fall short against Romney in the big-ticket Midwestern battlegrounds, his advisers believe he could press on with a campaign aimed at building a conservative coalition, delegate by delegate, for the Tampa convention.

“More than ever, a big part of our win is people saying, you know what, Santorum is the conservative standard-bearer, Romney is the moderate, we’re going to have a classical matchup,” Brabender said. “A lot of these delegates can be moved later on in a brokered convention.”

Viewed in the broader sweep of the 2012 race, the viability of a go-big strategy for Santorum may depend less on his campaign’s tactics and execution than on fundamental dynamics of the campaign that are currently not quite knowable.

According to one line of thinking, Santorum’s wins last week represent only the latest in a tedious line of false starts from conservative Romney opponents. His polling numbers have ballooned nationally, but so did Newt Gingrich’s after he won South Carolina – until Romney leveraged his overwhelming financial and organizational advantages to crush Gingrich in Florida. Santorum has benefited from a moment in the national debate dominated by cultural issues, but in the end, the thinking goes, Romney’s edge on the economy is probably controlling.

The other theory of the case, however, is that Santorum’s surge is proof positive that the Republican Party simply does not want to nominate Romney for president. Maybe (and even proponents of the theory acknowledge it’s only a maybe) Santorum’s sweep of last Tuesday’s primaries tore up the expectation among primary voters that the GOP will settle on Romney and created an opening for Santorum to knock him off.

The question is whether Santorum can afford to gamble on a confrontation he may not win – and that may not actually have a crippling effect on Romney, even if he does.

While the financial condition of both Santorum’s campaign and his super PAC have improved, advisers emphasize that it’s still a lean, low-budget campaign that has to be exceedingly choosy about where it plows in six-figure sums — let alone the scale of resources Romney has routinely committed to key primaries.

“It’s all about being disciplined and not wasting resources,” said Nick Ryan, who steers the pro-Santorum super PAC, the Red White & Blue Fund. “I also think it’s important he maintains the right tone — be the conservative happy warrior. Romney will be blistering and negative.”

It remains to be seen just how savagely Romney will come after Santorum. The former Massachusetts governor has criticized Santorum for his record on earmarks in Congress but has yet to air an attack ad against him. Multiple sources suggested that while Romney remains well funded, his campaign and super PAC can’t necessarily afford to outspend Santorum across the country by the 5-to-1 advantage Romney had over Gingrich in Florida.

And at least some prominent conservatives believe that tearing down Santorum will not be as easy a task for Romney as eliminating Gingrich was and that an all-out assault across the Super Tuesday landscape could even be counterproductive.

“That’s a mistake. Because Santorum’s a much more likable figure and a much harder figure to demonize than Newt Gingrich was. … If he does that, there’ll be a backlash,” said Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who suggested Santorum was poised for a strong March 6.

“I think he’s going to win Tennessee. He’s not going to win Georgia, but in states where there’s large evangelical populations, where they don’t have a native son running, I think he’s going to do well. I think he’s going to win Oklahoma,” said Land, who is neutral in the race. “He has won the battle with Newt Gingrich for the social conservative vote.”

Santorum himself, allies say, has taken a cool attitude toward the upheaval of the past week and the deliberations over what comes next.

At a strategy meeting with top advisers in Washington after his wins last on Feb. 7, Santorum was circumspect about the state of play in the race, according to one person close to the campaign.

“Rick said this the other day, in this meeting, that Tuesday night he was not euphoric,” this participant said. “But he wasn’t despondent after South Carolina. … We’re focused on winning day by day.”

Still, there’s some measure of optimism in Santorum’s world that the terms of the 2012 fight have changed in a durable way.

“I think you might actually see, because of the Tuesday election, exponential growth in the Santorum camp,” the Santorum ally said. “People have paid attention but didn’t think he could win.”

Jonathan Martin contributed to this report.