Nevada’s Sharron Angle to run for U.S. House

Reporting from Las Vegas —  Sharron Angle announced Wednesday that she will run for a U.S. House seat in Nevada, marking the “tea party” Republican’s return to politics after her November loss to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

A former state lawmaker, Angle will vie in 2012 to represent a GOP-leaning district that includes Reno, Carson City and the state’s rural swaths, partly because “Harry Reid still rules the U.S. Senate,” she said in an e-mail to supporters.

Angle ran for the House seat in 2006 and came within a hair’s breadth of besting Dean Heller in the Republican primary. Heller, who won the general election and still holds the seat, recently launched a bid for the U.S. Senate, as scandal-ridden Republican Sen. John Ensign is retiring.

Reid’s team significantly wounded Angle during a nasty, nationally watched battle. In ads blasting her positions on abortion rights, health insurance mandates, Social Security and job creation, Reid’s camp successfully painted Angle as “just too extreme” for swing-state Nevada. Since the election, Angle has remained a polarizing figure.

She announced her candidacy via a web video in which she sits at a kitchen table, gripping a coffee mug, and says she wants to rein in government spending and fight the rollout of President Obama’s healthcare law and “job-killing policies,” themes that dominated her failed Senate campaign.

Angle might face a crowded GOP primary, in which her dedicated supporters and conservative bona fides could propel her to victory. With a warm, grandmotherly persona, she also proved a prodigious fundraiser in 2010.

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