LAS VEGAS – Sharron Angle announced Wednesday 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 U.S. Senate, as scandal-plagued 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, 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 says she wants to rein in government spending and fight the rollout of President Obama’s health care law and “job-killing policies” — themes that dominated her failed Senate campaign.

Angle proved a prodigious fundraiser in 2010.