Jauregui faces 2 opponents in Assembly District 41 race

In Assembly District 41, which covers parts of the southern Las Vegas Valley including Paradise, Enterprise and Henderson, Democratic incumbent Sandra Jauregui is seeking a third two-year term against Republican Erika Smith and an Independent American Party candidate, Victoria DaCosta.

The district favors Democrats, who hold a nearly 4,000-voter registration edge over Republicans that equals 38 percent of active voters, compared with 30 percent for Republicans and 25 percent for unaffiliated voters. IAP voters are 4.5 percent of the electorate.

As a lawmaker, Jauregui is best known as a leading advocate for better gun safety. First elected to an open seat in 2016, she escaped the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting without physical injuries.

In the 2019 session, she was primary sponsor of a successful effort to ban bump stocks, which effectively convert semi-automatic firearms into fully automatic weapons, and create “red flag” laws to take guns from those deemed threatening to themselves or others. The cause remains a “a very personal issue to me,” she said.

”There’s daily person-on-person crime with guns and if we can do something to minimize gun violence and not just in the form of mass shootings, I will always champion that issue,” she said, adding: “I don’t want to introduce legislation or policy just for the sake of introducing it.” She wants to engage law enforcement and various stakeholders to “really figure out what policies work.”

Caring about people

Smith is a dentist who was encouraged by a close friend to run.

“His thing to me was you care about people and that is the quality that I think is missing,” she said.

She moved to Las Vegas in 2008 and has lived in the district for about four years. She became a Republican about a decade ago and says Republicans want uplift all people “so you’re not so dependent on government.”

“I am from a Democrat family. My mom and dad are Democrats,” she said. “When I look at my Black communities especially, and even our brown communities, our Latino community, I don’t like what the Democrats stand for. I feel like they push a lot of poverty, a mindset that is a poor, poverty stricken mindset, a victim mindset. And I believe that people should be thinking for themselves.”

DaCosta, a former dental hygienist who now markets communications software for health care companies, was similarly disillusioned by her former party, the Republicans.

“I was feeling the Republican Party I belong to, especially leaving California, didn’t represent my point of view,” she said. “It became more and more liberal, instead of common sense.”

She embraces her party’s strict constitutional interpretation and advocacy for minimal government and regulation, free markets, gun owner rights, economic individualism and school choice, among other tenets.

“I believe in the American spirit of capitalism,” she said.

COVID aftermath

On the economic and other impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Nevada, Jauregui said she hopes the state “will be in a better situation by the time the legislative session rolls around” and said lawmakers will “look for new revenue streams” to help manage and rebound from the pandemic’s effects.

”We did our job in the first special session, and balanced the state’s budget,” she said, referring to the summer’s legislative activity. “And during the second special session, we were able to explore other possibilities of bringing in revenue to the state sooner than would have been done without a special session.”

Specifically, lawmakers backed proposed constitutional initiatives that would increase the state’s tax on mining and change how it is assessed. Passage of the measures again in the next session would put them before voters in November 2021.

Smith and DaCosta both say they opposed the Democrat-backed measure to expand mail-in voting for the November election, embracing the belief by right-leaning causes that it is an opening to voter fraud.

Smith said she supports school choice and charter schools and was worried about the impact that COVID-induced distance learning is having on schoolchildren being deprived of the social interaction a classroom setting provides.

As a dentist, she is concerned about Nevada’s shortage of medical professionals and lack of mental health services. The state’s unemployment division, overwhelmed by claims stemming from COVID-triggered business closures, still needs more attention “because what if something else happens? We’re not prepared,” she said.

Contact Capital Bureau reporter Bill Dentzer at bdentzer@reviewjournal.com. Follow @DentzerNews on Twitter.