Last cycle, Mitt Romney didn’t just win Minnesota. He dominated, beating second-place finisher John McCain by 19 points.

This time around, Romney is fighting a surging Rick Santorum. A Public Policy Polling survey released today shows Santorum at 33 percent, with Romney behind him at 24 percent. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are close on Romney’s heels, at 22 percent and 20 percent respectively.

Talking to a Romney insider yesterday, Minnesota GOP strategist Gregg Peppin heard that the campaign was concerned about Santorum. “He said, ‘Well, I think Santorum could take this thing,’” recounts Peppin. “They felt that Santorum was making a late charge here, not unlike Iowa.”

Romney’s campaign appeared to be doing its best to halt Santorum’s unexpected surge, sending out an avalanche of e-mails yesterday to reporters attacking Santorum’s record and pointing out that Santorum endorsed Romney last cycle. In an interview on Minneapolis radio station WCCO yesterday, Romney spared no words when talking about Santorum. “His policies are, in my view, those of many Republicans in Congress who went along with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, to [allow] earmarks, and to [grow] the size of federal government to a level that is frankly choking off the capacity of our economy to grow at the rate it should,” Romney said, according to the Associated Press. “I think his approach was not effective.”

Meanwhile, campaigning in Minnesota yesterday, Santorum attacked Romney, saying, per Politico, “Governor Romney is absolutely incapable of making the case against Obamacare successfully, and therefore greatly damages our ability to be able to win this election, this very critical election in 2012.”

Currently, the PPP poll gives Santorum the lead among tea partiers, those who are very conservative, and evangelicals. Despite being endorsed by top evangelicals across the nation in a meeting held in Texas in January, Santorum has not won the evangelical vote post-Iowa; Romney won among evangelicals in New Hampshire and Nevada, while Gingrich won them in South Carolina and Florida, according to exit polls. But the tide may be shifting.

“I feel like I was hearing Gingrich a week and a half ago, and the past week I’m now hearing Santorum,” remarks Carol Schulstad, president of the Minnesota Faith and Freedom Coalition, about the preferences of Minnesota evangelicals. (Neither Schulstad nor the Coalition has endorsed a candidate.) She speculates the change might be driven by voters turned off by the negative sparring between the Gingrich and Romney campaigns.

But the race is hardly just a Romney–Santorum rivalry. Peppin speculates that Minnesota might see “a tight four-way race.”

“Any of the four candidates could win if turnout is light,” agrees Minnesota GOP strategist Ben Golnik. If turnout is low, he thinks Paul could emerge the victor. And Gingrich, Golnik adds, is “a wild card” in the caucuses.

As for Santorum, he pushed the audience at a Minnesota campaign event Sunday to vote for him so that they “can stop the streak” of wins Romney’s had, according to the AFP.

“Minnesota,” he added, “can reset this race.”

— Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.