Weeks after the 2010 midterms, Mike Biundo, a veteran New Hampshire political operative, met with a slew of presidential contenders. He was offered a couple of gigs but nothing piqued his interest. He mulled other options, including a bid for the state GOP chairmanship. But after talking with friends, he decided against it. Maybe, he told his family, it’d be best to take a break from politics, to try something else.

Earlier that year, the 43-year-old Biundo had managed a successful congressional race in the Granite State, and from 2007 to 2008, he’d been an adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. Exhausted after two grueling cycles, he didn’t feel compelled to enlist. Since his early twenties, the Long Island native has been on the trail, first gaining notice in 1996 when he worked as an aide to Pat Buchanan. As he glanced at the emerging field, he didn’t see a Buchanan-type, an appealing insurgent.

So Biundo went home to Manchester. But he kept an eye on things. He started reading about a fellow conservative Italian and Roman Catholic from the Northeast, a guy who was getting little attention from the pundits and big-dollar strategists. Biundo admired his underdog status and his blue-collar roots. He decided to get in touch with Rick Santorum, if only to give the senator a friendly thumbs-up. “I called them up; they didn’t call me up,” he says. “We had one meeting, then a second meeting. We just clicked.”

“I was going through some tough times with my family; my daughter was sick, she ended up having brain surgery. And he was so good about the whole process,” Biundo recalls. “I hadn’t decided whether I was going to work for him or not. But the compassion, in how he reached out to me as a man and as a person, not as somebody who was trying to hire me, convinced me that this is someone I needed to work for.”

“He would tell me about how he, Bella, and the family were saying the Hail Mary,” Biundo says. “As I dealt with my family, we went back and forth with stories, his experience with Gabriel, similar challenges in our own lives. There was a personal connection; it was different.” At first, Biundo started as Santorum’s state director, mostly working out of his home, connecting with activists. Santorum then began to search for a campaign manager. “There I was, working hard,” Biundo says. Santorum tapped him.

Early on, the pair agreed that Iowa, more than any other early primary state, should be their focus. As a longshot campaign, they had to surprise, to win over midwestern evangelicals. But they also knew that if Santorum began to pick up speed, to actually contend for the nomination, then they’d need to be ready to transition, in terms of organization and fundraising, from fledging wannabes to national players.

“We often talked about what happened to Mike Huckabee,” Biundo says, referencing the former Arkansas governor who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses only to fizzle in future primaries. “We knew that there would be perils, that while we based the campaign in Iowa, we had to be more than an Iowa-only candidate.”

Over a year later, Biundo and Santorum are still working together, debating strategy and messaging over late-night phone calls. John Brabender, a longtime Santorum confidant and media expert, is another integral part of the team. But it’s Biundo who manages the ground forces. At the moment, he and his candidate are facing the same obstacle they faced at the beginning of the campaign: scaling up, coordinating volunteers, and competing with Mitt Romney’s machine.

“We’ve gone from running for governor of Iowa to a national campaign,” Biundo chuckles. And it hasn’t been perfect since Santorum won the Iowa caucuses in early January — he stumbled in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada. But on Tuesday, Santorum won contests in Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota, which thrust him back into the race and, once again, into the national spotlight.

As the primary hurtles toward the ten-state “Super Tuesday” vote on March 6, Biundo is scrambling. But he is optimistic about Santorum’s chances. The former Pennsylvania legislator has collected more than $2 million since Tuesday night, and with weeks, not days, until the next major political test, the campaign has time to bolster its ranks and coffers. On the message front, Santorum is already engaging Romney, positioning himself as the GOP’s electable, conservative warrior.

Yet things remain fluid, as ever. Santorum is hustling but Romney remains the front-runner in national polls and at the bank, the candidate most poised to survive the long haul. Biundo isn’t worried. He predicts that February, with its quiet calendar, could be a turning point. Here are six factors to consider as Santorum surges.

The expectations game: The Santorum campaign is taking care to not put too much emphasis on any particular part of the map. Santorum will compete in the southern states that vote on Super Tuesday, such as Tennessee and Georgia — but with former Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich still in the hunt, Biundo does not believe that victory in those states, or any state, will be integral to Santorum’s survival. After picking up wins in the Midwest and Mountain West, the campaign is viewing the campaign through a national prism, not as a regional spoiler. “We’re picking our battles,” Biundo says. Santorum was in Texas — a state that doesn’t vote until after Super Tuesday — earlier this week. In coming days, the senator will likely make more visits to states that vote in mid-to-late March, such as Alabama. Those stops signal that however he fares in early March, Santorum will fight on. Picking up a few more upsets, plus performing better than expected as the field winnows, may be enough to keep Santorum nipping at Romney’s heels as the race shifts to Texas and the Northeast in April.

February finesse: In late February, a week before Super Tuesday, Arizona and Michigan will hold primaries. Arizona, where Romney leads in the latest polls, is probably not the best territory for Santorum. Romney won nearby Nevada decisively and has a bustling Arizona operation, plus the endorsement of Senator John McCain, the former nominee, and Representative Jeff Flake, a popular GOP congressman. Biundo says Santorum’s win in Colorado, which is home to many Mormons and Evangelicals, makes anything possible. But he likes what he sees in Michigan a bit more, mostly because the state will award its delegates proportionally, whereas Arizona awards all of its delegates to the winner. Michigan is full of conservatives, Biundo says, and though Romney grew up outside of Detroit, he did not win the state resoundingly in 2008. Look for Santorum to play there. A win in Michigan, or a strong second, could boost the campaign in Ohio and the Rust Belt in weeks ahead. Skipping Arizona, for the most part, would be akin to the campaign’s small-ball approach in Florida, where they knew they’d be outspent by Romney forces and unlikely to snag the winner-take-all crown.

The Gingrich collapse: As Gingrich struggles, Biundo says, the Santorum campaign is hearing from many Gingrich supporters, both volunteers and surrogates, about switching to Santorum’s team. “Newt is in a situation like the one we were in after we lost South Carolina: He is out of the news, and it’s going to be more difficult for him to raise money,” Biundo says. “I know that a lot of his grassroots activists in Georgia, for instance, and people who were involved with the [Herman] Cain campaign, are looking to be involved with our effort.” This migration to Santorum, he says, is a rarely shared story but an important one. As reporters cover the Romney–Santorum spars, Biundo says, Santorum is spending just as much time coalescing conservative voters around his candidacy, looking to take advantage of his latest rise. The campaign, for its part, is doing the same, “connecting with grassroots leaders in every state,” Biundo says. “We are keeping it focused on the grassroots but on a national level, opening small outpost offices as we plan for bigger things in the future. That puts us in a position to chase early voters, send materials to activists, have a place to pick up signs, and make sure we’re ready to coordinate.”

The staffer shuffle: After Santorum shocked the political world and eked out a win in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign was not ready to move quickly into New Hampshire, irrespective of Biundo’s deep roots in the state. Instead, it began to send Iowa field staffers to other states, hoping for the best, even if the staffers had little knowledge of the states to which they were assigned. No more. Biundo says the internal organization of the campaign will shift dramatically in coming weeks, with state staffs being run by state-based conservative activists wherever possible. “We’re making additional hires,” he says. “We can’t do the leapfrog thing from the past, sending staff from one state to another. We had to get more strategic. You’ll be hearing about some great hires, with folks focused on one- or two-state regions.” But he will not expand too much, cognizant that cash must be spent on the air in big states, not necessarily on the ground. “We are going to build not just for the primaries but for the future,” he says. “We are going to be efficient; we’re not a campaign that spends itself into debt. We do what we can do with the resources we have.”

The contraception debate: As the Obama administration wars with the Catholic Church over contraception, Santorum will embrace the moment, articulating his social conservatism and proudly defending the rights of religious institutions. “The senator has been more outspoken on these issues, more than any candidate in this race,” Biundo says. “We’ll make the same case now that we’ve always made, talking about how he’s conservative across the spectrum, and that he’s the best candidate for social conservatives.” Consistency on a broad range of related issues will be a key talking point, especially since most Republicans are united in opposition to the president. Santorum’s team sees vulnerability in Romney’s work on contraception, specifically his gubernatorial decisions, whether they were made via legal counsel or otherwise. As Santorum told a crowd in Oklahoma on Thursday, “the other candidates in this race have the same positions I have on these issues — at least that is what they say right now.”

The potential Romney backlash: Biundo says Santorum will not shy away from tangling with Romney. As the “conservative alternative,” he believes, Santorum can fight without risking a backlash. Biundo casts Romney as the moderate in the race – the candidate not afforded such a luxury. He bets that Romney will be damaged if he goes negative about past Santorum earmarks and the Pennsylvanian’s Beltway connections. “This is not the first time we’ve seen their guns trained on us,” he says. “Right after Iowa, when we came into South Carolina, the Romney machine turned on us. We have the benefit of a candidate who is extremely likable, who has been known for many years as a true conservative. The pundits who expect a backlash are right. Romney has gotten personal and extremely negative; he’s throwing rocks in a glass house, trying to paint Rick as something that he’s not. . . . [Romney] was going after earmarks for the Olympics and the Big Dig,” a construction project in Boston. “We’ll be pushing back on that stuff.” To return fire, Santorum’s campaign will also remind conservatives about the Massachusetts health-care program.

As Biundo sees it, the Santorum campaign is growing by the hour, with thousands in small-dollar donations flooding in. He’s hiring staff, and his candidate is a constant presence on television. Romney may remain the big fish in this race, but Biundo sees that as a fleeting reality.

As he moves ahead, working with Brabenderto sustain the momentum, Biundo wants to make sure that Santorum retains his accessibility and retail skills, even if television ads and debates dominate the national discussion. Back in January 2011, when it was just Santorum, Biundo, and a handful of advisers working on the impossible, Santorum ran his presidential race like a city-council campaign, handshake to handshake.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Santorum spent hours greeting college students and activists. “We’re going to keep that,” Biundo says. “It’s not as easy to do. But the senator is still going to be somebody who goes out there without a teleprompter, who goes out there and speaks to voters. We are a grassroots campaign and will stay that way. The voters still want to kick the tires and ask the questions. We have a candidate who wants to speak with voters. People want to be part of this, not be spoken to.”

— Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.