Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who as the chair of the Senate Republican Conference is considered the third most powerful Republican in the United States Senate, was defeated by his Democratic opponent Bob Casey Jr., who received 59% of the vote to Santorum's 41% in the November 7, 2006, general election. Santorum was perhaps the most influential political ally of the "intelligent design" movement, a connection on which Casey's campaign capitalized, United Press International (November 7, 2006) reported [Link broken]: "Ads cited his intervention in the dispute about disconnecting Terri Schiavo's feeding tube and his attempt to amend the 'No Child Left Behind Act' to teach the controversy between evolution and intelligent design." (See Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott, "The Antievolution Law that Wasn't" (PDF), The American Biology Teacher 2003; 65 (3): 165-166.)
Santorum's views on "intelligent design" were also cited in the endorsement of Casey by the York Daily Record (October 29, 2006), which described him as "[t]oo involved in the losing side of the divisive Dover intelligent design flap (remember, he was on the advisory board of the legal group that helped spawn that fiasco, praised the school board for 'taking a stand' on ID -- then resigned from the legal group's board after the judge's decision)". Santorum also contributed a preface to Darwin's Nemesis (InterVarsity Press, 2006), a collection of essays in honor of the godfather of the "intelligent design" movement, Phillip Johnson, in which he expresses gratitude to Johnson for help "in my efforts to inject a renewed and unbiased understanding of science and its practice into the curricula of our public schools."