North Carolina GOP Senator Michael Lee has been running for office since 2008. Finally appointed to a seat in 2014, he has spent the last decade-plus publicly portraying himself as a moderate while quietly and devastatingly voting repeatedly against the interests of North Carolinians.
Most disappointing, given that Lee represents New Hanover County, is Lee’s continual failure to adequately address the area’s needs after it was revealed that Chemours has been polluting our drinking water for decades.
In June 2017, news broke that Chemours’ Fayetteville Works facility was discharging GenX into the water about 100 miles upstream from Wilmington and that utilities drawing from the river couldn’t filter it out. Rather than support increased funding to the Department of Environmental Quality to establish a Water Health and Safety division and continue testing for GenX, Lee stood with his fellow Republicans to support his own bill – one with less aid and more restrictions.
Lee’s actions were roundly criticized. A 2018 editorial stated, “Republicans in the state Senate have given us our first look at how they plan to handle the GenX pollution… We all should be afraid. It looks as if they want to block state agencies from doing anything about the pollution.”
In the years since, Lee has continued to let down his region. In 2018, he introduced a bill that environmental groups said “would actually slow down and complicate North Carolina’s ability to stop polluters like the one at the heart of the GenX pollution.”
In 2020, a WHQR interviewer pressed Sen. Lee on the lack of progress, stating, “Two years later, we are of course still finding GenX and other contaminants in the water supply, customers do not have water that we can say is free of unregulated toxic contaminants.”
In 2021, Lee voted for a bill, eventually vetoed by Gov. Cooper, that would have limited public information on the safety of drinking water. In 2023 and in 2025, Lee voted for bills that rolled back regulations on polluters and made it harder to ensure communities can have access to clean drinking water.
Overall, Lee’s long record against clean water has earned him a lifetime score of 5% from the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters.
In addition to repeated votes against clean water, Sen. Lee has voted seven times to restrict abortion access in North Carolina, including being the deciding vote to institute a statewide ban on abortions after 12 weeks of gestation in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade, and voting to institute a 72-hour waiting period for people seeking abortions, which is among the longest in the nation.
Lee, who has previously run for office on promises to “oppose an extreme ban on abortion,” instead voted lockstep with his Republican colleagues, resulting in policy that has pushed access further out of reach for North Carolinians, especially those in rural areas, forced women to carry to term pregnancies they do not want, and denied them care they need.
Soon after Lee voted for the abortion ban, one pregnant woman in North Carolina, Ciji Graham, died after she was refused treatment for her heart condition and was unable to get an abortion in time.
North Carolinians have been harmed by Michael Lee’s disregard for our health and safety for too long. It’s time for a change. In New Hanover, Lee faces off against Democratic candidate Jessica Bichler.
Bichler is a small business owner and long-time Wilmington resident who is running to support working families, pay teachers an adequate salary, and hold big polluters accountable for contaminating drinking water in the coastal communities.
