Former North Las Vegas mayor running for Congress as Republican

Former mayor of North Las Vegas John Jay Lee this week announced he will run for Nevada’s fourth congressional district, a position currently held by Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford.

Lee is a  former member of the state Senate state Assembly, where he served as a Democrat. In 2021, while serving as mayor, however, he switched to the Republican Party. 

Lee could have run for reelection as mayor, but chose to run for governor instead and lost to Joe Lombardo in the Republican primary.

During his campaign for governor last year, Lee said he would fight to pass a bill to ban abortion after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, before most women even know they’re pregnant. 

He also said he wanted to break up the Clark County School District into smaller districts, and give North Las Vegas its own district. As the Pahrump Valley Times reported, he also expressed support for school choice voucher programs, which divert public dollars to private schools.

Now, he’s up against two other Republicans in the race for the Congressional District 4: David Flippo and Alberto Orozco. 

On Lee’s social media account, he focuses on a handful of key issues, including immigration and opposition to gun safety laws. 

In his campaign announcement, he also said he would make mental health one of his top priorities.

The fourth congressional district has flipped between Democratic and Republican representation since it was created as a result of the 2010 United States Census. Democrat Steven Horsford first won the seat in the 2012 House elections, before losing in 2014. He won the seat again in 2018, however, and has served in Congress ever since.

Congressional District 4 is located in the central part of the state, it includes most of northern Clark County, southern Lyon County, most of Lincoln County, a sliver of Churchill County and all of Esmeralda, Mineral, and Nye counties. 

The  district includes North Las Vegas, where the population is over 50%  Latino. 

Twenty-eight percent of the households in the district report speaking a non-English language at home as their primary shared language according to DataUSA. The most common non-English languages spoken as the primary language in households are: Spanish with 158,091 households, Tagalog (including. Filipino) with 17,297 households, and Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese) with 2,595 households according to the research. 

The primary will occur on June 11, 2024 and the general election will be on November 5, 2024. 

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