Rick Santorum announced his next step on Friday: a new group that will raise money for Republican candidates and push them to be more conservative.
"A lot of people have some basic anxiety about where America is going, and I tried to talk about those [issues] in the campaign," Santorum said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "The adherence to the Constitution, and the importance of understanding where our rights come from and who we are as a people, and the culture and how that is being changed by this administration, whether it's liberty or life or marriage."
He said his new 501(c)(4), "Patriot Voices," would advocate for those issues and encourage other Republicans to do the same. The goal of the organization is to attract one million members, according to a press release, and it will be able to accept unlimited contributions. Patriot Voices will also work with the Red White and Blue Fund, a super PAC that supported Santorum in the Republican primary, to support conservative Republicans.
In the primary, Santorum's voice was often the one that pulled the conversation from jobs and the economy -- the prefered topic of presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney -- to social issues, and with his new group the former Pennsylvania senator seems to want to keep them central in the conversation.
Still, Patriot Voices is aimed at helping Romney to become president. Santorum said he plans no further announcement endorsing the candidate after his lackluster late-night email to supporters, but denied that there was bad blood between the two men. In fact, he said that a meeting between Romney and him ahead of that endorsement went "exceptionally well."
"The announcement was late at night in an email because I was sending an email to -- we have about 300,000 email folks that we communicate with, and we wanted it to be in their inbox first thing in the morning so it didn't get buried later in the day," he said.
Watch Santorum's announcement of Patriot Voices: