(CNN) –– Rick Santorum's heading back to Iowa Wednesday.
And anytime a potential White House hopeful heads to the Hawkeye State, which kicks off the presidential caucus and primary calendar, the national political media takes notice.
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The former senator from Pennsylvania and GOP presidential candidate who battled eventual nominee Mitt Romney deep into the 2012 Republican primary calendar has a jam packed 24-hour visit to Iowa. An aide to the former senator tells CNN that Santorum, who's considering another bid for the White House, will meet with senior strategists who guided his January 2012 victory in the Iowa caucuses.
Santorum, who remains popular with social and fiscal conservatives, will also do numerous local interviews with Iowa media and hold a press gaggle with reporters. And he'll headline a fundraiser for Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, who's running for Congress in a district that stretches from Des Moines to Council Bluffs. Schultz endorsed Santorum just before the 2012 Iowa caucuses, even though he and Romney share the same Mormon faith. Santorum edged out Romney to narrowly win the caucuses, in a delayed and disputed vote count.
Santorum has been very open about the possibility of a second White House run, and Virginia Davis, a senior Santorum adviser, hammered that point home, telling CNN that "Senator Santorum is taking a serious look at a presidential run in 2016."
In a recent interview with Time Magazine, Santorum said that if he were to launch another campaign for the GOP nomination, "I'd raise a lot more money. We'd have to have a stronger team, and a stronger fundraising base."
Santorum ran a bare bones campaign in 2012, and was vastly outspent by Romney. He added that if he ran again, "this time around I don't have to go out and prove my bona fides on being a conservative. I can focus in on how I differentiate myself from the rest of the field and how I think we can develop a winning message for the fall."
Even though Santorum was effectively the last man standing against Romney in 2012, he polls in the mid-single digits in most national polls of Republicans' choice for their party's 2016 presidential nominee, near the bottom of a very crowded pack of potential contenders.
Santorum's short visit to Iowa comes just two weeks after he was in New Hampshire, the state that holds the first primary in the race for the White House. He addressed the crowd at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua.
This is Santorum's first visit to Iowa since last August, when made the rounds at the Iowa State Fair, spoke at a major gathering of social conservatives, and headlined a county GOP fundraiser.