2006 United States Senate election in Rhode Island

The United States Marine Corps (USMC), also referred to as the United States Marines, is the maritime land force service branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for conducting expeditionary and amphibious operations through combined arms, implementing its own infantry, artillery, aerial, and special operations forces. The U.S. Marine Corps is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States.

Sheldon Whitehouse is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Rhode Island since 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a United States Attorney from 1993 to 1998 and the 71st attorney general of Rhode Island from 1999 to 2003.

The United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island is the federal district court whose jurisdiction is the state of Rhode Island. The District Court was created in 1790 when Rhode Island ratified the Constitution. The Federal Courthouse was built in 1908.

A perennial candidate is a political candidate who frequently runs for elected office and rarely, if ever, wins. Perennial candidates' existence lies in the fact that in some countries, there are no laws that limit a number of times a person can run for office, or laws that impose a non-negligible financial penalty on registering to run for election.

John Francis Reed is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Rhode Island, a seat he was first elected to in 1996. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the U.S. representative for Rhode Island's 2nd congressional district from 1991 to 1997. Reed graduated from the United States Military Academy and Harvard University, serving in the U.S. Army as an active officer from 1971 to 1979. He is the dean of Rhode Island's congressional delegation.

James R. Langevin is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Rhode Island's 2nd congressional district from 2001 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the first quadriplegic to serve in Congress; Langevin was appointed to be the first quadriplegic speaker pro tempore of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019. Langevin did not seek reelection in 2022.

Patrick Joseph Kennedy II is an American politician and mental health advocate. From 1995 to 2011, he served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Rhode Island's 1st congressional district. He is a former member of the President's Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, and co-founder of One Mind.

Matthew A. Brown is an American attorney, activist, and politician who served as secretary of state of Rhode Island from 2003 to 2007. Brown was a Democratic candidate for governor of Rhode Island in the 2018 election.

The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Founded in 1828, it was predominantly built by Martin Van Buren, who assembled politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party. Its main political rival has been the Republican Party since the 1850s, with both parties being big tents of competing and often opposing viewpoints. Modern American liberalism — a variant of social liberalism — is the party's majority ideology. The party also has notable centrist, social democratic, and left-libertarian factions.

Lincoln Davenport Chafee is an American politician. He was mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, from 1993 to 1999, a United States Senator from 1999 to 2007, and the 74th Governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015. He was a member of the Democratic Party from 2013 to 2019; in June 2019, The Boston Globe reported that he had become a registered Libertarian, having previously been a Republican until September 2007 and an independent and then a Democrat in the interim.

Cranston, once known as Pawtuxet, is a city in Providence County, Rhode Island, United States. The official population of the city in the 2020 United States Census was 82,934, making it the second largest in the state. The center of population of Rhode Island is located in Cranston. Cranston is a part of the Providence metropolitan area.

The Club for Growth is a 501(c)(4) conservative organization active in the United States, with an agenda focused on tax cuts and other economic policy issues.

Addison Mitchell McConnell III is an American politician and retired attorney serving his seventh term as the senior United States senator from Kentucky, which he has held since 1985. McConnell is the Senate leader of the Republican Party, having served as minority leader since 2021 and previously from 2007 to 2015, and as majority leader from 2015 to 2021.

Kentucky, officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri to the west. Its northern border is defined by the Ohio River. Its capital is Frankfort, and its two largest cities are Louisville and Lexington. Its population was approximately 4.5 million in 2020.

John Sidney McCain III was an American politician and United States Navy officer who served as a United States senator from Arizona from 1987 until his death in 2018. He previously served two terms in the United States House of Representatives and was the Republican nominee for president of the United States in the 2008 election, which he lost to Barack Obama.

Arizona is a state in the Southwestern United States. It is the 6th-largest and the 14th-most-populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona is part of the Four Corners region with Utah to the north, Colorado to the northeast, and New Mexico to the east; its other neighboring states are Nevada to the northwest, California to the west and the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja California to the south and southwest.

Laura Lane Bush is an American teacher and librarian who was the first lady of the United States from 2001 to 2009 as the wife of President George W. Bush. Bush previously served as the first lady of Texas from 1995 to 2000. She is also the daughter-in-law of former president George H. W. Bush.

William Harrison Frist is an American physician, businessman, conservationist and policymaker who served as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1995 to 2007. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as Senate Majority Leader from 2003 to 2007. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Frist studied government and health care policy at Princeton University and earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from Harvard Medical School. He trained as a cardiothoracic transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford University School of Medicine, and later founded the Vanderbilt Transplant Center. In the 1994 Republican Wave, he defeated incumbent Democratic Senator Jim Sasser. He pledged to only serve two terms.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent regulatory agency of the United States whose purpose is to enforce campaign finance law in United States federal elections. Created in 1974 through amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act, the commission describes its duties as "to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections."

Lincoln Davenport Chafee is an American politician. He was mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island, from 1993 to 1999, a United States Senator from 1999 to 2007, and the 74th Governor of Rhode Island from 2011 to 2015. He was a member of the Democratic Party from 2013 to 2019; in June 2019, The Boston Globe reported that he had become a registered Libertarian, having previously been a Republican until September 2007 and an independent and then a Democrat in the interim.

Sheldon Whitehouse is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Rhode Island since 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a United States Attorney from 1993 to 1998 and the 71st attorney general of Rhode Island from 1999 to 2003.

The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Founded in 1828, it was predominantly built by Martin Van Buren, who assembled politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party. Its main political rival has been the Republican Party since the 1850s, with both parties being big tents of competing and often opposing viewpoints. Modern American liberalism — a variant of social liberalism — is the party's majority ideology. The party also has notable centrist, social democratic, and left-libertarian factions.

The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. It has been the main political rival of the Democratic Party since the mid-1850s. Like them, the Republican Party is a big tent of competing and often opposing ideologies. Presently, the Republican Party contains prominent conservative, centrist, populist, and right-libertarian factions.

The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest labor union in the United States. It represents public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers at colleges and universities, retired educators, and college students preparing to become teachers. The NEA has just under 3 million members and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The NEA had a budget of more than $341 million for the 2012–2013 fiscal year. Becky Pringle is the NEA's current president.

Stuart Rothenberg is an American editor, publisher, and political analyst. He is best known for his biweekly political newsletter The Rothenberg Political Report, now known as Inside Elections. He was also a regular columnist at Roll Call and an occasional op-ed contributor to other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Orlando Sentinel.