Despite the fact that he was heavily outspent by Mitt Romney and lost by a hair, Rick Santorum was the real winner in last Tuesday's Iowa Caucus. The former Pennsylvania senator tailored his message to the electorate and spoke directly with Iowa voters in a series of Town Hall meetings. His campaign was hoping that a win in the Iowa Caucus would establish him as the frontrunner and shelve any concerns about his “electability.”

But he won’t be able to maintain this fiction for very much longer.

Santorum had only a week until this Tuesday's primary in New Hampshire, the state where two of the GOP’s fringe candidates, Jon Huntsman and Buddy Roemer, have focused all of their energy. Santorum’s “Google problem,” lack of national organization and extreme rhetoric are not going to resonate with New England voters. In Iowa he had time to play the slow, long game, remaking himself to be the perfect candidate for the Hawkeye State.

Santorum won’t have this advantage in New Hampshire. He’ll be facing a fresh set of voters who will have spent the last week being debriefed on his history of inflammatory hate speech, the sort of hardline fundamentalist dogma that prompted Dan Savage to turn his name into a sexual neologism. While this publicity nightmare didn’t prevent Santorum from placing second in a state caucus, it has severely hindered his ability to raise money and attract national support, making him little more than a distraction in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire will be a race between electability and ideology. Rick Perry, who appeared to ready to get out the race for the Republican presidential nomination after his poor showing in Iowa but jumped back in, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Santorum are ideology candidates. Each has worked hard to distinguish himself as the true anti-establishment conservative, paring down his particular brand of conservatism to a series of talking points. Perry is the "crime and punishment" candidate: His execution record as governor makes him attractive to voters who favor aggressive, punitive foreign and domestic policy.

Paul is the “reform” candidate: He’s anti-war, anti-drug war and anti-choice and his message resonates with some liberals and moderates. Santorum is the “family values” candidate: He’s anti-gay, believes in outlawing contraception, and has indicated he would annul gay marriages by legislative fiat.

After Tuesday’s poor showing, Gingrich and Rick Perry are both zombie candidates, but they can still drain support from each other and the other long-shot candidates. Each of them will receive a slice of the voters who purposely ignore the “horse race” aspect of the election and vote for the candidate that most stringently adheres to their personal beliefs.

Romney and Paul are the most electable candidates in New Hampshire — by a wide margin. Romney’s exit polls from Iowa indicate that those who voted for him did so because they believe he has a shot at unseating President Obama in November. Romney and Paul will carry the lion’s share of the voters, being the only candidates with coordinated, established political operations in the state.

After the New Hampshire primary the media’s attention will narrow to those two possible candidates. Perry will go back to his governorship, Gingrich will go back to touring the world with his third wife and Santorum will be another cautionary tale about taking the results of the Iowa Caucus too seriously.