For front-runner Mitt Romney, the Iowa Caucuses ended not with a bang, but a quasi-victorious whimper. The former Governor of Massachusetts spent millions of campaign dollars (and had millions more spent by the super-PAC that gathers anonymous donations on his behalf), but won by barely more than a tie. Romney got literally eight more Caucus voters than Rick Santorum, who spent far less but visited all 99 counties in the state. His campaign is wasting no time to use this as a fundrasing tool, per below:

Eight is not a code for eight thousand or eight delegates. It’s eight people. (No one earns delegates at the Caucus, unlike primaries.) While I love the idea of retail democracy, and people gathering together in a physical space to discuss the candidates, eight people in one state do not a consensus make. In addition, the number of Caucus voters did not rise dramatically. This year’s total was a hair more than 122,000 voters, just 3,000 more than 2008.

To recap the numbers:

Romney:        30,015            25%
Santorum:     30,007            25%
Paul:              26,219            21%
Gingrich:       16,251            13%

Now it’s time to move on to New Hampshire, which will provide the first delegate wins in the 2012 primary. While Rick Santorum continues to appeal to working-class white Americans, Romney does far better among higher-income and better educated white voters. Romney owns a second home in New Hampshire, a state a stone’s throw from the one he once governed. Of course, it’s precisely the higher-income and more educated voters who boosted the Obama campaign in 2008. They’re more likely to be fiscal conservatives than social conservatives, and Romney is trying hard to paint himself as the only option for fiscal conservatives in this race.

Mitt Romney has always been the man to beat in this race. His greatest opponent is his own outrage — a simmering outrage that Republican voters don’t embrace him more heartily. To a certain extent, leveraging that outrage works. During Iowa, his proxies went nu-q-lar against Newt Gingrich, who was briefly the Iowa front-runner and then, under a barrage of  negative ads, finished fourth. Gingrich got on a plane for New Hampshire late last night, after calling out Romney for “nasty ads” and saying that Ron Paul’s ”views on foreign policy…are stunningly dangerous for the survival of the United States.”

So: the big question for New Hampshire is who will try to counter Romney. The Suffolk University polls, one of the go-to in tracking New Hampshire, show:

Romney maintaining his lead with 43 percent of the vote, followed by Ron Paul (16 percent), Jon Huntsman (10 percent), and Newt Gingrich (9 percent), while Rick Santorum (5 percent) has moved ahead of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, who had 2 percent each.

Santorum may make gains in New Hampshire following Iowa, but his social conservatism may not play as well in the next context. New Hampshire legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, and polls show that a majority of citizens don’t want those rights repealed. Santorum wants to see a federal ban on gay marriage, which may endear him to some Republican constituencies but is not the kind of message he can run on in New Hampshire. It’s simply one aspect of how Santorum’s social conservatism may not boost him in New Hampshire, though it may serve him better in South Carolina and Florida contests.