Here is the thing about setting up lunch with Manhattan’s likely incoming congressman to talk about his career as a child magician. People will offer up an inexhaustible inventory of metaphors. Everyone and their mother will try to tell you how magic explains the political moment.

They will tell you that politicians understand the power of illusion, how to tantalize the audience with a sleight of hand. They will tell you that politicians are experts at playing on our desire for belief, inflating us with hopes that expire after showtime.

Strangely enough, Micah Lasher, who is poised to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler in Manhattan’s 12th District, actually spent his campaign trying to play down his quirkiest dimension: the successful career as a magician that ended at about age 15. It was something he only agreed to meet with me and talk about begrudgingly.

When I started calling New York-area magicians to ask them about Mr. Lasher, one of them wasn’t entirely certain whether he was a Democratic or Republican, or what office he had just won, but was familiar with a self-titled magic book published in 1996: “The Magic of Micah Lasher.”

Mr. Lasher, as a teenager, became so well-known in the magic world that he performed on the “Today” show, “CBS This Morning” and on television in Thailand. He also appeared in a segment of “The Late Show With David Letterman,” along with several other magicians, though his performance got cut.

“A lot of kids get into magic because it’s a demonstrable way to prove that adults don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Adam Rubin, the proprietor of 69 Atlantic, a magic theater in Brooklyn, who knew Mr. Lasher’s childhood work.

Mr. Rubin wasn’t shocked by the leap from magic to Congress. “Being aware of the ability to manipulate someone’s reality in the simplest way — there’s lessons in that,” he said. “You learn that perception is subjective.”

Mr. Lasher, a state assemblyman known as a nerd, had a different idea. Over a grilled cheese sandwich on the Upper West Side, he explained that magic taught him how to start with an outcome and work backward to make anything possible. Want to make someone think that a jack just turned into a three of spades? That can be done.

He argued, with just the shadow of a mischievous smile, that it’s the same spirit he has carried into writing up bills in Albany, or crafting policy for the governor — insisting that the state could try to cut unmet mental needs in half over five years, or that a road map to build 800,000 more housing units in New York could help pave the way to “City of Yes.”

Mr. Lasher was elected to represent a whole congressional district full of legends and storytellers. It’s the land of the Carlyle and Barney Greengrass, of Philip Roth and Edith Wharton. He was elected in one of the most expensive House primaries in history, jostling for attention in a fight with a Kennedy, a tech whiz and Kellyanne Conway’s ex.

Some of his opponents were prolific posters, but votes in this particular congressional primary ended up for the most part inversely correlated with social media followers. Mr. Lasher, a former state assemblyman and proud policy wonk, won over voters with a buttoned-up, bland approach to campaigning decidedly uncharacteristic of Manhattan. He marshaled his local government expertise and dove into white paper explanations with zeal.

Running to represent more than 700,000 people with 700 million quirks and opinions, Mr. Lasher campaigned not as a star, but as a civics teacher willing to talk your ear off about the data center moratorium, a politician vociferously anti-fluff.

Still, I brought him a deck of cards and told him I feared I might be fired unless I got him to do tricks for me, and he obliged.

“Begin with the proposition that any outcome is achievable,” Mr. Lasher said. “If you had a magic wand, what would you want to achieve?”

Mr. Lasher’s magic trick involved asking me and his aide to cut the deck into piles of what we estimated to be about 10 cards. He then revealed with a flourish that each of these mini stacks had a 10-card on top. Afterward, I spent an afternoon trying to teach myself how to replicate it by watching YouTube videos. What I learned is that studying magic is a little like a lesson in underestimating people. A trick similar to the one Mr. Lasher did — to which I responded, “Whoa!” — was billed in videos as one of the dumbest stunts a person could learn.

For Mr. Lasher, magic was once a reason to meet fellow obsessives. He told me that as a preteen he attended a gathering of magicians in the back room of a deli called Reuben’s on 38th Street and Madison Avenue, where, between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturdays, some 50 enthusiasts would sit around and talk about magic.

These peculiar magical meet-ups involved, at various points over the years, famous magicians like Herb Zarrow, as well as other New Yorkers you might not expect like the former chairman of Bear Stearns, who would hold forth talking about thumb tips. And at least sometimes, there was 11-year-old Mr. Lasher, already impressing the grown-ups in the heart of the district that he would one day represent.

“I was at a fairly young age pretty comfortable around adults,” Mr. Lasher said. “Maybe more comfortable around adults than kids.”

Mr. Lasher did occasional birthday party performances, and at around age 12 got a deal to write his magic book. This taught him yet another lesson obliquely translatable to politics. “It’s a belief that you can take any process no matter how complex and break it down into its component parts and explain it to people,” Mr. Lasher reflected. “That’s an important thing in politics as well, and particularly in policy, being able to explain how something’s going to work.”

Mr. Lasher’s mother has played a proud, vocal role in his political career. But it was his father, who died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2022, who nurtured his interest in magic. Howard Lasher, who loved the Yankees and shopping at Barney’s (“Dress British, think Yiddish”), collected a shared trove of magic books with his son, and delighted in doing tricks for him.

The older Mr. Lasher kept doing magic until the end of his life. “He ended up being the mentor to the young magicians’ group in New York City,” Mr. Lasher recalled. “I think he found a sense of community.”

Mr. Lasher hasn’t shared much of his own magical fixation with his children; he wasn’t even certain they knew about his childhood book until the recent campaign. “One of the reasons I lost interest or took a step back from it was because it becomes a novelty aspect of one’s personality,” he said. “That insecurity sort of lingered, maybe still lingers.”