McGovern did not mourn leaving the Senate. Although being rejected by his own state stung, intellectually he could accept that South Dakotans wanted a more conservative representative; he and Eleanor felt out of touch with the country and in some ways liberated by the loss. Nevertheless, he refused to believe that American liberalism was dead in the time of Reagan; remaining active in politics, in January 1981 he founded the political organization Americans for Common Sense. The group sought to rally liberals, encourage liberal thinking, and combat the Moral Majority and other new Christian right forces. In 1982 he turned the group into a political action committee, which raised $1.2 million for liberal candidates in the 1982 U.S. congressional elections. McGovern shut the committee down when he decided to run for president again.