Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.
The first thing you’ll notice about the video interview above and the clips below is that my guest is incredibly pixelated throughout each clip. But in this case, that’s a sign of authenticity: Anna Aho Rink lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a massive rural stretch of land bordering Lake Superior, where broadband can be sparse and cell phone reception is often spotty.
Rink is running for the state House, vying for one of 12 seats that was decided by 5% or less in 2024. They need to flip four seats to take back the majority, and perhaps a critical trifecta, pending Senate and gubernatorial elections. That makes this one of the most competitive and pivotal elections in the country this November.
Watch above or read below, and know that the pixelation is the point.
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In a perfect, fair, or even less barbaric world, Anna Aho Rink would not be running for elected office. It’s the first thing she says about herself: “I am not a politician,” which, yes, is something a politician would say, but it doesn’t take long to realize that she means it.
Ideally, Rink would still be working as a physician’s assistant at the Planned Parenthood in Michigan’s upper peninsula. But the organization was forced to shut down dozens of locations in the spring of 2025 after the Trump administration cut off reimbursements to its women’s health clinics, and the Marquette location was among those forced to close its doors.
Rink had worked as the care provider at the clinic for 17 years, so when she saw her final patient, she knew that she was closing a significant chapter of her life. What Rink couldn’t have known then was that the next chapter was waiting for her as soon as she stepped outside.
“We had some supporters that were going to clap us out of the building — I thought it was going to be maybe 10 or 12 people, but it was well over 100 people and absolutely overwhelming,” Rink told Progress Report this week. “I gave a really quick heartfelt speech. I don’t even remember what I said in between sobs of ‘We’re going to continue to be here for you. The work doesn’t stop here. We’re going to keep fighting, I promise.’ And someone was like, ‘Hey! Have you thought about running for office?’”
The answer, obviously, was absolutely not; “I am not schmoozy. I trip up the stairs most days. I’m not particularly polished,” she admitted. More importantly, as the lone abortion provider in the entire Upper Peninsula, Rink was focused on finding a way to restore access to reproductive care to a rural region where hospitals can be hours away and telehealth is only reliable as shoddy broadband.
“Just in the blink of an eye, everyone in this region was left without that care, without a brick and mortar place to go for the services. And it was devastating,” Rink said. “We shouldn’t have to suffer with the rug being pulled out from underneath us repeatedly and not have the resources that we need to quite literally survive. There was not a backup method. There wasn’t a safety net.”
The priority was clear: Spearheading the founding and funding of a new general health clinic — with hospitals closing, shuttering their delivery units, and going to emergency care only, there was an acute need for the entire spectrum of care. But the idea of running for office stuck with Rink enough that she mentioned it to her husband, who surprised her with his level of enthusiasm.
“He said, ‘All this extra hustling that you do and all the extra support systems that you’re trying to build up for folks, you could help so many more people if you ran for office and just helped to change the laws,’” Rink remembered.
The community came together to stand up the new health care clinic, where Rink tends to a broad range of patients. At the same time, she continued to mull over the whole running for elected office idea; like her husband said, all the work it took to get one clinic off the ground could be exponentially more impactful in government.
What clinched the idea was discovering that there was nobody else in the GOP-controlled House who could do that work, at least with any expertise. There are no health practitioners in the Michigan legislature, much less anybody with experience in reproductive care. And to top it off, the 109th district, where Rink was born, raised, and raised her kids, is currently represented by an anti-choice, anti-vax TV weatherman who doesn’t even believe in climate change.
The rural district, based around the town of Marquette, had been dominated by Democrats for half a century until it flipped red by just over 3% in 2024. To some, it was only a matter of time, an inevitability given the conservatism of the rest of the Upper Peninsula. In a sense, it was collateral damage for the progressive reforms that Democrats passed with the trifecta they won in 2022; Rink acknowledges that the clean energy requirements passed in Lansing provoked backlash in a region where the infrastructure for it simply doesn’t exist. Attacks on mining, one of the region’s historic industries, didn’t help, either.
But there’s also a dire rural housing crisis, an affordability crisis, and of course a health care crisis for Yoopers to contend with, and Rink is banking on a community-oriented populism to help her flip the district back to blue. Universal health care, banning private equity takeovers of medical practices, supporting union workers — those are progressive policies that resonate with a working class region that often goes ignored in a state where people are concentrated on the other side of a five-mile bridge.
“All of these people are working way too hard to care for folks that we care about in our communities, and we shouldn’t have to work this hard to do it,” Rink said. “It should not be this difficult to provide basic health care to people. People struggle to find housing. People struggle to find child care. People struggle to find good paying jobs. I’m proud of how we come together as a community and I’m proud of our ingenuity and the solutions that we come up with to problems. But we pay taxes too! We shouldn’t have to be working this hard.”
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