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Rick Santorum’s campaign is looking lean, mean, and flush with green after clearing $9 million in February contributions. The former Pennsylvania senator and challenger to Mitt Romney went through $7.9 million over the course of the month, but closed with $2.6 million in the bank. The cash haul wasn’t enough to put him on level turf with Romney’s campaign, but money in the bank isn’t all that’s brought Santorum to his head-to-head match-up against Romney in Tuesday’s Illinois primary. He’s riding a rising tide of discontent in a fractious GOP, and whether or not he wins the support of Illinois voters may make a big difference in the coming months. Exit polls in the early evening Tuesday showed that Santorum did well in the evangelical southern part of the state. But Romney may stand to knock him down a peg in a state where only 31 percent of Republicans describe themselves as “very conservative.” Romney got his own multimillion-dollar boost last month when Bob Perry, the Texas homebuilder who bankrolled the anti-John Kerry Swift Boat ads, gave a pro-Mitt super PAC $3 million.