Ryan Clancy once defied his government by becoming a human shield in Iraq. Today, he accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians and has said the job of a Milwaukee police officer has no dignity or value. He wants more immigration and more taxes on the wealthy – and no property taxes for Wisconsin public schools. He calls himself a proud father of trans and non-binary children.
At a time when the federal government is lurching to the right under President Donald Trump, the 48-year-old Bay View resident is Wisconsin’s most prominent elected Socialist – and he’s not merely a fringe figure. Clancy has won four general elections since 2020, elevating himself from a narrow win to the Milwaukee County Board to a second term in the Wisconsin Assembly against the wishes of the area’s most prominent Democrats. And he’s aiming to gain a larger following.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
“I’m spending just a ton of my time knocking doors in other districts and identifying folks that we can work with on the left to make the idea that we’re meeting people’s basic needs less radical,” Clancy says. “I want that to be the norm.”
Clancy’s success points out how homogeneous the two-party system has become. “It tells us the timidity of both parties,” says Mordecai Lee, an emeritus political science professor at UW-Milwaukee. “Democrats don’t want to get criticized by Fox News, and Republicans don’t want to get criticized by Trump, and so all of a sudden everybody’s standing in a straight line. And there’s this guy off in the wings who’s totally different.”
A Political Foothold
CLANCY AND HIS YOUNGER BROTHER grew up in Milwaukee, Brookfield and Glendale. He was 9 when his parents divorced, which meant summers were spent with his dad in Minnesota and later in Florida, which exposed him to a variety of peer groups. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but I think it gave me a different skill set, too,” he says.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Beloit College in 2000, Clancy joined the Peace Corps and went to the Philippines, where the inequities in wealth stood out to him. “Prior to that, I had looked at the idea of socialism or communism as, they were the bad guys,” he recalls.
A turning point occurred in 2003. A month before the United States’ invasion, Clancy spent weeks at a grain silo in Iraq. He hoped his presence would deter the U.S. from bombing the country, or at least spare the infrastructure. It didn’t work. The U.S. later fined Clancy about $8,000 for his human-shield defiance. The larger aim of the protest, Clancy says, was to show the world that Americans were not unified. “Ultimately, the rest of the world knowing that it’s not every American on the same side, protects American lives,” he argues.
Clancy found himself leaning more into socialism after he and his wife, Becky, co-owned the former Bounce Milwaukee recreation facility for nearly nine years. He discovered how difficult it was to make a profit while providing his employees what he considered a fair wage, as well as paid time off and health insurance. A dispute with the landlord ended Bounce in 2023, three years after Clancy entered politics. His first run for public office was for an open seat on the nonpartisan County Board.
“I knocked on more than 10,000 doors myself, almost every door of every registered voter in the district, and I didn’t ask them to vote for me,” Clancy recalls. “I asked them, what’s important to you? What would you like to see generally, or at the county? Is it transit? Is it parks? Is it public safety? And I listened and I took a lot of notes.”
His campaign advisers were incredulous. You have to ask them to vote for you.
“But it was an 11-month campaign, a lot of really long conversations – like, you’re not supposed to sit down with somebody for 20 minutes who’s probably not going to vote for you,” Clancy says. “But that helped me get some of my best ideas for policy. It was hearing people’s needs and then listening to them.”
Clancy followed with a second round of doors before Election Day.
“It’s important not to have unity when the result of that unity is stifling dissent and just maintaining the status quo. The status quo is terrible for a lot of folks. It’s important to have voices in the room that are willing to say, ‘Hey, let’s try something else here.’ Ultimately, that’s the way to reduce division, because that’s how we return respect from the people that we represent. We need folks who are fighting for all of their residents, not just for campaign donors.”
“I said, ‘Hey, five, six, seven months ago, we talked about housing. Here’s my plan. We talked about public spaces and the parks. Here’s my plan. And then they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I’d love to vote for you. Let’s put somebody on the County Board who’s going to fix those things.’ I’m glad that I took the time to listen first.”
In a three-way primary, Clancy finished second to community organizer Andrea Rodriguez, but then defeated her by 48 votes to win the election.
In April 2022, Clancy won re-election unopposed. Seven months later, he ran unopposed to win election to an open seat in the state Assembly, where he caucused with Democrats. Last fall, then holding only the Assembly seat, Clancy had to fend off a challenge from lawyer Jarrod Anderson in the Democratic primary. Anderson was backed by establishment Democrats, including Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, but Clancy won 55% to 45%, then was re-elected without GOP opposition in November.
Clancy made waves by opposing Act 12, the Republican-led legislation that was signed into law in 2023 by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and backed by Crowley and Johnson. It enabled the city and county of Milwaukee, with strings attached, to levy sales taxes. Clancy saw that as regressive, with a disproportionate effect on lower-income people.
Johnson and Crowley “took the chance when they thought they had it to take me out,” Clancy says of the primary challenge from Anderson. “That’s the kind of good trouble that I want to be part of.”
Clancy has made other enemies on the left side of the political aisle. “He’s a horrible colleague,” then-state Rep. Daniel Riemer, D-Milwaukee, told Urban Milwaukee last year. “He is someone who can’t be trusted.”
“It’s not so much the socialism that sets him apart. What sets him apart from others is his personality,” says County Sup. Sheldon Wasserman, a Democrat who was also a former seven-term Assembly member. He says Clancy twice supported candidates who ran against Wasserman for County Board. “Then he wants to work with you,” he says. “It’s not normal human behavior.”
Clancy says he has opposed Wasserman because Wasserman “hasn’t passed any significant legislation for more than a decade.”
“It’s really easy to kind of get in line with what the expectations are for elected officials. And often those expectations are really low,” Clancy says. “And I think that’s our problem, right? People expect us to get into office and then just do what it takes to stay there. And I often take positions that are not immediately popular with other elected officials. I’m proud of those things, but there is a political cost for those.”
A New Era of Milwaukee Socialism
CLANCY’S RISE TO FULL-TIME lawmaker recalls Milwaukee’s early days as a national bastion of socialism, which advocates for public, rather than private, ownership of property and resources.
In 1910, Milwaukeeans elected Socialists Emil Seidel to the mayor’s office and Victor Berger to the U.S. House. They were the first Socialists in the U.S. elected to those offices. These were the widely popular “sewer Socialists” who focused on basic services like water systems and quality-of-life improvements like parks.
“So when we have electeds who are coming through here trying to use the S-word as a slur, I think a lot of people in Wisconsin and Milwaukee balk at that,” Clancy says. “That is part of our history. You can’t cross a bridge or walk through a park without seeing some of that Socialism. Even folks that didn’t embrace that Socialist label for themselves loved Socialist policy.”
“Looking back on it, we could have handled things so much better. But as a result of that experience, and having to kind of re-form my understanding of how our child presented, [i came] to the realization that this is the same person that we’ve known and loved. And having to do some work ourselves to be as accepting as they deserved, I have so much more understanding for other parents and people generally that are still struggling with that and kind of still on their own journeys.”
By the mid-20th century, however, Milwaukee’s Socialism era had ended – a victim in part, Clancy believes, of the Red Scare. Clancy’s County Board win made him the first Socialist elected to public office in Milwaukee since 1956, when Frank Zeidler won his last term as mayor.
Clancy makes his brand of the S-word sound simple: providing a level of subsistence that frees up people to thrive. “We can get there with good policy,” he says. “If people don’t have to worry about the basics of food and shelter and health care and all that, they can participate in our society in a way that benefits everybody.”
Clancy believes those policies are catching on. “When I first ran for office, it was a much different conversation. People would be like, ‘Oh, you’re a Socialist’ – like, the very-Fox News, catch-all bad word for people you don’t like,” he says. “And then having to explain that in a more academic way and talking about Milwaukee’s Socialist history, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the reason we have so many parks and clean drinking water.’
“By and large, people don’t question the Socialist part of who I am, but when they do, I’ll say, ‘That’s fine, you don’t have to love being a Socialist, but which of my Socialist policies do you disagree with? Is it the right to counsel, is it paid parental leave?’ They say, ‘Oh, no, those are all great.’
“When Darrin and I first got to the statehouse, it was amazing to have conversations with some Republicans. They were like, ‘Oh, you eat human food, you have actual fingers and everything.’ Yeah, we’re looking at things differently, but we actually have stuff in common, especially when it comes to things like over-policing, over-incarceration. I think there is often some common ground with Libertarians and folks like that. So things are not always black and white in terms of politics.”
“Ultimately, the way that I bring people into Socialism is not through academics, it’s through policy. It’s having policies in place that meet people’s basic needs.”
(A right to legal counsel for tenants facing eviction was approved by the county in 2021; paid parental leave was approved for county employees in 2022.)
Clancy takes pride in that the Assembly’s Socialist Caucus, the first since 1931, has doubled in size in the past two years. Besides Clancy and another Democratic Socialist, Darrin Madison of Milwaukee’s North Side, who was also elected to the Assembly in 2022, the members are Democrats Francesca Hong of Madison, elected in 2020, and first-term Rep. Christian Phelps, who represents an Eau Claire-area district.
Clancy wants to change the environment at the State Capitol so “the default is, everybody has the right to have shelter, everybody has the right to eat, everybody has the right to health care. Then we can make the fights be about the details rather than that basic premise. I think that’s what victory looks like.”
Could this throwback, still an outlier in today’s politics, achieve even higher levels of public office? Wasserman doesn’t see it: “The longer he’s in office, he’s making more and more enemies.” Lee isn’t sure, but for people who thought Socialism ended with Frank Zeidler, “it turns out that the fire is still burning,” he says. “It’s not a big campsite, not a lot of people are sitting around the fire, but Socialism still lives in Wisconsin politics.”
Criminal Justice: Eliminate Cash Bail
Clancy proposed state legislation in 2023 to nearly eliminate the use of cash bail in criminal court cases. (The bill did not get a hearing.) Defendants should not be forced to post bail to stay out of jail while their cases are pending unless it is proved they are dangerous, Clancy contends. When defendants are jailed before trial, they’re separated from their families and their jobs and more likely to plead guilty just to be freed, he argues.
Badger Institute: “The Manhattan Institute [think tank] got a longtime New York City prosecutor to study New York’s long-running experience. The conclusion: Ending cash bail permits recidivism from those most prone to reoffend.”
Education: Eliminate Property Tax Funding of Schools
“It has never worked well, and yet every single state does that to some extent. I want to rip off that Band-Aid and stop that entirely,” Clancy says. He proposes replacing property tax revenue by funding schools, which he contends creates inequities between affluent and poorer communities, with state general revenue by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
Badger Institute: “Ending the link between property taxes and education funding would be progress. We favor it. The link to property taxes stands in the way of greater parental choice in public and independent sectors. He’s wrong, generally, about inequities in funding: The large role of state aid has been to reduce or erase differences in tax bases between districts.”
Right to Counsel
In 2021, Clancy proposed and the County Board approved using $916,576 in federal COVID-19 relief money to fund a pilot program providing free legal assistance to residents facing eviction. Typically, landlords have representation in eviction cases but tenants don’t. The program, run by Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, is continuing with $250,000 grants for 2025 from both the city and the county.
“If you evict somebody, they’re likely to lose their job. Eviction is almost on par with losing a parent in terms of childhood trauma. And all of those bad impacts are going to lead to higher incarceration, lower educational attainment, and it’s really devastating our economy,” Clancy says. “So, whether you think it’s the right thing to do or not, it’s the more efficient thing to do.”
Badger Institute: “Taxpayers and the private sector provide plentiful help for the indigent. Pitting the government against landlords will drive them out of business. Rentals will become scarcer and rents will go up – harming everyone.”
Policing: Fund Fewer Cops to Make Communities Safer
“If more police made us safer, I would reconsider that stance, but the data says that they don’t,” Clancy says. “You could even take that money and put it into public spaces and get a better return on your investment than you do police.” The Washington Post in 2020 reviewed spending on state and local police over the previous 60 years and found no correlation nationally between spending and crime rates. A 2022 peer-reviewed study found that greater amounts of green space were associated with lower property crime risk in 301 major U.S. cities.
In 2021, Clancy proposed, but the County Board rejected, moving $11 million from the Sheriff’s Department budget to other purposes, including parks and pay raises. In 2023, he wrote on Facebook that the job of a police officer has “neither dignity nor value.”
Badger Institute: “There is a lot of evidence that more police deter crime. It’s common sense but also backed up by multiple studies. More police matter, but so does how they are used. It’s not just about spending, in other words.”
Housing: Less Renting and More Home Ownership Through Co-ops
“The way that we try to confront the housing crisis that we have – by and large, handing money to developers and hoping that they will magically make long-term, sustainable, low-income housing that is of good quality – has failed drastically,” Clancy says. Clancy wants to promote ways for people in apartment complexes to get ownership where they live. In 2023, he introduced state legislation to create a revolving loan fund to build co-op housing, particularly for multi-family structures.
Badger Institute: “More homeownership is great. And if people want to be part of a cooperative that owns their home, that’s something the state and city have no business impeding. Clancy’s bill, however, would have had taxpayers subsidizing co-ops – an expensive gambit that would do nothing to address the supply and regulatory barriers that make apartments costly in the first place.”
