Will Rick Santorum run for president again, next time around? He's not ruling it out.

"I'm certainly leaving the door open for that," Santorum told Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg in a recent interview. "I'm making no commitments at this point, but we're not doing anything inconsistent with running in 2016."

That double-negative seems to hedge quite a bit, but Santorum has refused to rule out another run for president since his exit from the 2012 race, which paved the way for Mitt Romney to assume the mantle of de-facto GOP nominee in April 2012.

Santorum recently visited an influential early primary state, campaigning for Mark Sanford's opponent, Curtis Bostic, in South Carolina's First Congressional District special-election primary.

In the same interview, Santorum criticized GOP advisers and the Romney campaign team for being too liberal. At Malzberg's prodding, Santorum suggested Republicans need a more conservative candidate to win in 2016.

"Well these are the same advisers who botched these last two campaigns are now saying, 'Well, since we can't win with moderate Republicans we have to now try to be liberal Republicans to win instead of standing up for the values that made our country great.' We have not had a nominee that is willing to go out and articulate a unified vision of what conservatism is, what American first principles are about, and why we're the greatest country in the history of the world, and then we wonder why we don't win," Santorum said. "That's why we don't win, and I assure you that when this next Republican primary comes around for president, we will have a strong, principled, conservative nominee, because that's where the Republican Party is across America. It's not about these talking heads that you're hearing a lot of in the media today."