Former Las Vegas mayoral candidate joins congressional race

Tera Anderson, a Las Vegas resident who previously ran for mayor, now has her sights set on Washington D.C.

Anderson joins a growing list of Republicans hoping to unseat Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, including Dr. Aury Nagy and Marty O’Donnell. The 2026 primary election will be held June 9, 2026.

With experience working in industrial commercial development, Anderson says she has the experience to improve housing accessibility and manage growth in Nevada.

“We’ve experienced exponential growth, and I think now more than ever, we have to be very deliberate and responsible about what that growth looks like because we do have infrastructure constraints, including water (and) land,” Anderson said.

Anderson works as the vice president and development asset manager for IRG Realty Advisors, a real estate services company headquartered in Ohio, and she has served as the president of the City of Las Vegas Neighborhood Association.

She said she is intimately familiar with the federal land development process in Nevada and would like to see the Bureau of Land Management land-nominating process become less time-consuming and costly.

Anderson is supportive of Rep. Mark Amodei’s efforts to sell public lands in Southern Nevada for housing and development. She said it was a critical step forward to “getting Nevada into the driver’s seat of its own destiny.”

Much of the conversation on housing has centered on affordable housing, a federally subsidized housing solution that keeps people in a perpetual rental situation, Anderson said.

“I want to move towards reinvigorating access to home ownership, which I think is very achievable and can work in collaboration with the BLM land release mechanisms and how the state appropriates nominating lands for release,” Anderson said. “To me, that’s where you really elevate people out of poverty.”

The second-generation Nevadan said she also wants to prioritize improving health care, public safety and education. She wants to avoid the “middle school food fight of politics” and the mud-slinging, and instead achieve real results for Nevadans by bringing back “common sense decision making,” she said.

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.