With the presidential election looming over everyone’s heads, it can be easy to forget that many local political positions are also up for election. Democrat Ryan Clancy is running for re-election in the 19th District of Wisconsin’s State Assembly. He has no challenger listed on the ballot.
Prior to getting involved with politics, Clancy was a Milwaukee Public School teacher. He then served as Milwaukee County Supervisor before becoming an assembly member in 2023. He’s passed several bills that had impacts on the greater Milwaukee community, such as the right to counsel for tenants getting evicted and paid parental leave for county employees. You can read more about the legislation he’s proposed or passed here.
District 19 covers the area along Lake Michigan from Shorewood down to East Oklahoma Ave. It’s home to about 56,000 people, according to census data. It’s the district that most UW-Milwaukee students vote in if they choose to vote in Milwaukee. It encompasses many iconic Milwaukee locations, such as downtown, the Historic Third Ward, and the Port of Milwaukee.
The Wisconsin State Assembly is one half of Wisconsin’s legislature, with the other half being the Wisconsin State Senate, according to the Wisconsin State Legislature website. All Wisconsinites are represented by two legislators, one in the Assembly and one in the Senate. The two houses work together, with the executive and judicial branches, to pass legislation that affects both individual communities and Wisconsin as a whole.
I sat down with Ryan Clancy for an exclusive look into some of his policies.
Czaplewski: What are the main issues your campaign chooses to focus on this election cycle?
Clancy: There’s a couple, I’m kind of a policy nerd, so it’s hard to narrow it down. One I have been working on in this last term is housing policies. We put out something called the tenant protection package, which is about 20 different bills that make it easier to be a renter in Wisconsin. It’s really, really difficult, and I know students often bear the brunt of that. Certainly, in terms of terrible housing stock, and not a lot of consideration from landlords because you’re considered temporary tenants. Some other stuff not as applicable to students, although some students are certainly impacted, are the conditions of confinement in Wisconsin’s jails and prisons, which are absolutely horrifying. I was a country supervisor up until April of this year, and their conditions are terrible. We have a couple more bills that would make things more humane for individuals incarcerated, also making sure we don’t incarcerate as many people as we have been. We keep incarcerating more and more people over time, and it’s bad and very expensive. I think that when we are spending money on that than on meeting people’s basic needs, it’s hard to make that work.
Czaplewski: How do you expect some of your policies to affect college students in your district?
Clancy: There’s a lot in that housing package. Other kinds of student things, when I thought we were going to have broad student loan forgiveness at the federal level, I wanted to make sure at the state level that forgiveness wasn’t taxed as a state tax because that’s an additional burden for folks. It’s great to have these loans taken care of, but if you then suddenly owe thousands of dollars in taxes, and that is not something that can be refinanced generally, then that’s a hardship. So I passed bills at the county level saying we were in favor of that, but it did not pass at the state level. It became moot because all those student loan forgiveness just didn’t happen. Hopefully, we can be in a position nationally to see that happen over the next four years, although you don’t hear folks talk about that at the national level unfortunately. We can then pass that at the state level so then if and when that happens we can relieve that burden. Other little things I was part of were grants for students in student-teacher education programs specifically, so getting people into the pipeline for being teachers. As a former teacher myself I know this was tough, forgiving tuition during the student teaching semester. When you’re providing a service, and you’re in the schools, it seems a bit unfair that you’re also paying tuition, when that, for most student teachers, takes their entire experience and then some. They’re going to class and doing that. Increasing grants to UW and tech students generally, some more funding access to UW schools generally. If folks are having issues there is one office at the state that can help students in college navigate that process.
Czaplewski: Could you tell me about your Right to Counsel policy?
Clancy: It’s been wildly successful. I got it passed in 2021, it was actually the first ARPA project that Milwaukee County passed, and I was able to get together Milwaukee County, the City of Milwaukee, and then also the charity United Way, and basically split the cost of a program that would provide an attorney to anyone facing evection anywhere in Milwaukee county. Even prior to the pandemic, we were evicting 14,000 people a year, and the personal costs of that are terrible. It’s on par for a family with children with losing a parent. It is incredibly damaging; it leads to higher blood levels, it leads to struggles in education, and people losing their jobs. It’s absolutely, ridiculously bad. So I was proud to pass that in 2021, and it’s now helped more than I think 12,000 people, which has been a huge success.
A report came out from Stout two years ago now, that said not only was it incredibly effective, but it had huge gains on racial equity, because often black folks, and women in particular are faced with evections more than other folks, but that is was incredibly efficient. For every dollar we spent on that, we saved $3 downstream, on blood levels, employment, economic impact, and all that. It’s been a huge success. The county executive did not include funding for it in his recommended budget that he released last week, and that has justifiably angered a lot of folks. I know folks are trying to amend that and get it back in there. I’d love to see it paid for by the state, but until Democrats are the majority, that’s not unfortunately going to happen. To see that go away would mean that evictions skyrocket after December of this year if the program goes away. I’m hopeful that folks who are still on the county board and the county council in Milwaukee can hopefully piece something together and make up for the fact that the county executive really dropped the ball on this. It was frustrating to see him know that we arranged funding for three years, and he knew the end was coming and did nothing to save it. It was a really successful and widely popular program, and he actually campaigned on that.
Czaplewski: Besides the Right to Counsel, what other policies that you’ve created or passed do you think have had the most impact on the community?
Clancy: One of my favorite ones at the county, again, was they paid parental leave for folks. So whether they were adopting or having a child, having six paid weeks of time off has been really transformative, and not a month went by, especially closer to when I passed that, that I didn’t have some tearful county employee calling and saying thank you so much, this has really been transformative. I got to be there for my baby just after we had them, and how important that is. Again, it’s not just a feel-good thing, that data says it’s incredibly important to allow parents to have that time with their kids.
Czaplewski: You have expressed support for Palestine in the past. Do you think that accurately reflects how your constituents feel?
Clancy: There was a fascinating piece of reporting, and this was around the UWM encampment, where I spent a fair amount of days and nights. I was incredibly impressed with the level of ozonation and education happening in that space. I did an open records request from the dean’s office and the chancellor’s office, and the vast majority of emails were supportive of the encampment and the students in it, and their ability to stand up and take a stance on something that is the right thing. Yet it was funders, a handful of folks with a lot of money, who were threatening the chancellor and saying that he needed to basically crack skulls, call in the police, and just end this protected First Amendment speech. I’m very proud of the stance that I took there and much more proud of the students. It should be a source of shame for anyone who was involved in shutting that down and also threatening the student organizations and the students themselves and their academic situation because there should be no safer place to protest to make yourself heard than on campus. So, I will say that taking that stance had a significant political cost to me, and the reason I drew a primary challenger and ended up in a half-million-dollar primary was that. It was a couple of folks who were very loud, very rich, who wanted me removed simply for that stance. I think that’s frustrating. I am glad that I have another couple of years to be loud and support students and their activities, but I would have loved to see folks put the same amount of energy into flipping some of these other districts across the state as they put into removing a left-leaning Democrat with someone who is a conservative Democrat. It was a frustrating experience, but I could not be more proud of the students, and I am glad that they are continuing to raise their voices. And yes, to answer your question more directly, and this was brought out by both the vast number of doors that I knocked on, I mean thousands and thousands of doors, and by national polls that show that both an arms embargo and an immediate ceasefire are wildly popular with the American public. I think elected officials who are continuing to ignore those calls are out of touch, both nationally and here locally.
Czaplewski: You have also expressed support for measures to improve Milwaukee’s sustainability. How do you plan to continue and improve sustainability in Milwaukee?
Clancy: That’s been a big one for me too. I think that is one of the most salient issues, especially for students and younger folks, and I’m glad that they continue to push all of us in that arena. I think ten years ago it was being played off as you can either have environmental suitability or you can have racial equity, but I’m glad that there is more happening to combine those two and to look at situations through both a racial equity lens and what about environmental sustainability. And that’s been a challenge, I think, for some folks to wrap their heads around, but those things are intertwined and sustablby doesn’t need to be just the focus of rich white folks who can put solar panels on their roof, but of everyone. It’s key, I just came from Florida.
Every time I do one of these, and they’ve gotten worse over the years I’ve been going down to some disaster for eight years, and it seems like every year it gets worse then the year before and the data backs that up too. We are creating literally perfect storms, not just in terms of the environment, and climate change, but also in terms of how close people are too poverty, so that when something like this happens, the folks that I was helping you know find shelter and food and underwear and socks because they had lost everything, didn’t have in many cases the means to get a hotel room for a couple of days, they didn’t have that support structure from friends and family because their friends and family were in that same situation.
So it is so frustrating to me to see folks in states that are being hit really hard by these disasters constantly voting against both FEMA funding, but also voting against things that would lift their residents out of poverty so that they can better weather those storms. It’s tough to come back from those, but I also know that those experience really inform my legislation. The right to shelter came from those experiences, working a lot with focus who don’t have other options and cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and in many cases have jobs. A lot of what I do when I’m sheltering is going though a huge checklist and one of the equations is do you have a job and did you lose the job because of this disaster, and so many people are increasing being justifiably angry and saying I worked my entire life so that I would have something and it’s just been wiped out and feeling really angry against the system that they weren’t able to put more aside and those aren’t just bad choices that their making it really is baked into the system. We’ve got to to make the system better to help people out.
Czaplewski: How do you plan to continue to uphold abortion rights, as mentioned on your website?
Clancy: One of the things I was able to do at the county level was to put together an abortion travel fund so for county employees, and this was prior to Planned Parenthood continuing abortion services in Milwaukee which I’m glad they’ve done, but that will remain even if we lose a Supreme Court justice. Those decisions go the other way again. We also have to push to repeal that awful ridiculous 1849 state law which some people interpret as making abortion care illegal.
I was also, in 2023, able to put on the ballot an abortion referendum question that said do you think that abortion should be banned in Wisconsin. I think 74% or 77% of people said, of course, we shouldn’t ban it, it’s basic health and medical care. That has become the bases for repealing the 1849 law, but the Republicans didn’t look at that overwhelming result, and we saw similar results in Dane County and across the state where it has been done. Rather than looking at that and saying maybe we should work together on common sense legislation, they banned putting referendum questions on future ballots, so now we’ll have to both get abortion rights back and get back the right to ask people on the ballot what’s important to them. The same thing happened with marijuana legalization. County residents clearly have opinions that are not reflected by the folks who pretend to represent them.
Czaplewski: What are your thoughts on the upcoming referendum question regarding noncitizen voting?
Clancy: It seems that the Republicans have figured out that if they pass horrific legislation, usually the governor will veto it, but if they can try to amend the constitution, the governor can’t veto that. They can keep putting these just awful, harmful questions on the ballot. This one, just like the last one, is intentionally misleading. If you were to just walk into the voting booth and look at it, you would go, oh I guess this makes sense, it’s not clear what it would change immediately. What it does is change the language from every citizen has the right to vote to only citizens have the right to vote. On the face of it, that seems ok, but it’s not, it is an attack on anybody who might not be able to document their citizenship or folks who are kind of on the margins anyway, so people who are currently incarcerated, immigrants who are here and have citizenship but might not have those documents available. One of the things that I’ve been doing while door knocking is asking can you prove your citizenship to me right now, and most everybody says no, or they’ll say yes, and I’ll say your driver’s license isn’t proof of citizenship, I would need a passport or a birth certificate. A lot of folks don’t have those, especially older adults and students, don’t have ready access to those.
A lot of students at UW for instance, come from other places and they don’t have a birth certificate sitting around, they don’t have those things. One of the things I’m going to push this next term is to allow all reasonable student IDs to be used for voting ID as well, because Republicans’ continued attempts to have people jump through hoops are just wrong, and it’s very transient. Often we’ll see leaked emails from them saying we want to stop people from voting, which is the goal. It’s an attack on immigrants, despite the fact that a lot of people aren’t talking about it that way, that’s clearly it. When you hear people talking about it, they imagine these boogie men, these undocumented immigrants that are showing up and voting, and we know that isn’t happening, we haven’t found a single documented case of that, and yet the Republicans are jetting this up, I think to try and get people to vote and go to the polls who wouldn’t otherwise go and frankly hate immigrants and think they can turn people out that way. I’m afraid it’s going to pass, I think the last budget referendum, which is also terrible and would have stripped away the ability for the governor to respond to things in an emergency, even future governors. That took I think about 3.2 or 3.4 million dollars to defeat, this one doesn’t have that; all the money is focused on the top of the ticket and those really competitive races, and people aren’t talking about this enough. It’s terrible, please vote no. Attacking the basic ability of every citizen to vote is bad, and there’s no good reason to do that unless you want to take away people’s right to vote.
Czaplewski: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Clancy: One thing I will do is keep pushing for the right to protest on campus, and I drafted legislation that would roll back the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) ban so the boycott investment in Israel. Also, protecting doctors providing gender-affirming care because, in other states, we’ve seen doctors targeted by those. We saw 24 separate attacks by Republicans on trans folks, especially trans students, in his last term. We’re going to try to put some proactive things in place to make it easier for folks.
Constituents can reach out to Clancy via his website, clancyforassembly.com, or on his social media, @ryanclancywi.
Good in depth reporting! He gave detailed and precise answers to your questions