On November 4, 2025, Angel Johnston won the mayoral race in Three Rivers, Michigan, beating the incumbent 784 to 427. Before that, Thomas Lowry had served as mayor for 26 years. If he had won, he would have gone on to his 14th term in office.
Johnston did it without a campaign team, without party backing, and on a modest $2,200 budget. She also did it while managing a chronic illness that kept her off her feet for much of the early campaign.
I went from maybe having a chance to win to knocking it out of the park.
I felt truly prepared once I found GoodParty.org, because GoodParty.org filled in all the gaps for me.
Three Rivers: A Town Ready for Change
Johnston grew up visiting Three Rivers on vacation and moved there in her 30s. She holds a master's degree in public administration from Western Michigan University and worked on campaigns before settling in town. By the time she decided to run for office, she had watched the city drift for years under the same leadership.
“I was seeing the same things I had been seeing for a long time, except they were getting worse,” Johnston said. “I love Three Rivers. I've been coming here my whole life. I watched it go from an adorable town that was growing, to an adorable town that was getting slightly less adorable. I knew that having had the same leadership for so long was a big part of the problem.”
At first, Johnston looked for someone else to run against the incumbent mayor.
“Everybody said no. Nobody wanted to try it, because it had been the same people for so long, and nobody wanted to go up against the mayor who became my opponent. Everybody thought they would lose or that it would just be really difficult, and nobody wanted to put themselves out there and lose.”
When no one stepped up, Johnston decided she would be the one to oppose Lowry.
Her platform centered on local issues like lead pipe replacement, police department funding, and financial transparency.
“My town was really, really ready for someone new, and I had the credentials behind me to do a good job,” she said.
A Grassroots Campaign Built on Multipliers
Unlike most candidates, Johnston started her campaign unable to knock doors.
“I discovered that I have Lyme disease and something called mast cell activation syndrome, both of which produce chronic fatigue. I also think I broke my toe, which was very difficult too, because it was just hard to get out there,” she said.
Johnston spent the early weeks building the bones of her campaign: her website, her social media presence, and her platform. Then she made phone calls and booked coffee meet-ups where she could sit and talk to one or two people at a time.
By the time she was able to begin door knocking, she had the campaign infrastructure in place to power effective voter interactions.
Johnston brought her energy, warmth, and love for Three Rivers to the campaign. GoodParty.org provided the toolkit that made the rest of the campaign possible. Johnston used voter data to build her walk list, segmented text messages to tailor her messaging, and stayed on course with a custom campaign plan.
She noted that voter data enabled her to customize her messaging to each voter:
What I loved was that I could separate [voters] out by party. Mine was a nonpartisan election, so I didn't have a party to claim, but I was able to target each group of voters a little bit differently, because Democrats care about some things and Republicans care about others.
Neither are necessarily right or wrong, but it's a different approach for each one.
After her day job ended at 4:00 p.m., Johnston would walk her dog, eat in the car on the way to a neighborhood, and canvass until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. On Saturdays, she'd start at 10:00 a.m. and knock doors until late afternoon. She never knocked doors on Sundays before 2:00 p.m. — a rule learned from years of campaigning in a community with a strong church culture.
Her opener at every door was the same: "Hi, my name's Angel, and I'm running for mayor. I'm going around today talking to neighbors to find out what your concerns are."
At the end of positive conversations, her ask was always the same: call five friends who live in the city and tell them why you’re excited about the campaign.
I would always tell people, ‘We only have one vote each, but we can multiply our votes by talking to our friends and family.
'So if you really want to see some changes in this community and you want to give me a chance to be at the helm of that, please reach out to five people within the next couple of days and just let them know that you've got this opportunity and ask them to do the same.'
When voters raised specific concerns, she pointed them to the series of YouTube videos she’d filmed from her front porch.
“I wanted to make sure that people who didn't necessarily know me already had a chance to see me in my natural setting, sitting on my porch talking to my neighbors, and that the people who did know me from having worked various jobs in town realized, ‘Oh, it's that Angel. I remember her,’" Johnston said.
Johnston said she knew the videos were working when strangers started recognizing her at the grocery store.
“People would just straight up come up to me: ‘Hi, are you that girl who's running for mayor? Yeah, I saw your YouTube video about whatever. Let's talk about that for a moment,’” Johnston said. “That's when I knew that I was really, really starting to be successful with YouTube.”
Yard signs rounded out her campaign strategy, helping to raise awareness about the off-year election.
“I can't tell you how many times I would go to install a sign in somebody's yard, and they'd say, ‘Ugh, you're so far ahead of the game. You've got a year,’” Johnston said.
“I'd say, ‘No, I don't,’ and I'd show them the sign. I'd say, ‘I've only got until November.’ They'd say, ‘Oh, my goodness, that's it? It's this year?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ So that was really important, and that was completely against the advice that I got from everybody all the time.”
That visibility play led to real results. In a previous election, Three Rivers had seen about 900 total votes cast. Johnston's race drew 1,211 voters.
“With GoodParty.org's help, we increased voter turnout by a third.”
Overall, GoodParty.org gave Johnston’s campaign the support she was missing as a nonpartisan candidate.
“GoodParty.org was the bones that I needed,” she said. “I had a lot of experience campaigning, so I knew what I needed to do, but I didn't know how to do it outside of the party structure. I had worked with one of the major parties, so I had access to voter data. I had access to people who could provide text messages for me. I had a community around me. I had people to talk to about what my signs should look like or what colors worked or what didn't, what grabbed their eye and what didn't.
“But outside of that structure, I didn't have those things. So when I found GoodParty.org, it was like I had everything back again. I had the structure around me that I needed and the infrastructure that made this campaign possible.”
Governing the Way She Campaigned
Six months into office, Johnston is delivering on what she heard from voters during the campaign.
Road projects and a water improvement project are in motion. Johnston is pushing for increased police department funding to address understaffing — an issue she campaigned on and is now pursuing publicly, including by asking residents directly how they want budget funding divided.
Johnston said the community response has been positive.
“They say that politics is a thankless job, and that has just not been my experience. People reach out to me, they text me, they call me, they email me, they Facebook Messenger me just to say that they're grateful that I'm doing this,” she said.
Johnston is also empowering young people in Three Rivers to step into leadership positions. She recently appointed an 18-year-old to the city's planning commission.
“I'm really interested in having folks who are younger get on our boards, our city commission, and our advisory boards as well,” Johnston said. “Let them bring their freshness, their amazing ideas, and their wonderful energy to our community. They're the folks who are going to live with the decisions that we make now the longest, so I really firmly believe that they should be the ones making those decisions.”
Johnston is one of over 13,000 independent and nonpartisan candidates who have won their elections using GoodParty.org.
Her advice to anyone considering running against a long-time incumbent:
People want change all over this country. Get your ducks in a row. Figure out what you need to do to win. Figure out your win number, work with GoodParty.org, get ready, and then launch your campaign, because you can do it.
All the infrastructure is there. You just have to commit to it, and if you follow the program, you're going to be just fine. You'll win. You can definitely do this.
