Micah Lasher, a leading candidate for a coveted New York City House seat, likes to say that his political brand is “nerd.” It was not hard to see why as he recently campaigned across uptown Manhattan.
While one of his rivals rallied with A-listers in a former nightclub and another sparred with A.I. giants, the 44-year-old Mr. Lasher handed out leaflets at a farmers’ market with the suspender-clad congressman he hopes to succeed, Jerrold Nadler.
He audibly sighed on Columbus Avenue when an aide suggested he film yet another one of those direct-to-camera social media videos so in vogue for politicians. (Mr. Lasher’s preferred mode of communication: a newsletter aptly named “Into the Weeds.”)
And with voters on both sides of Central Park, he eagerly shared details from his prodigious résumé to make the case that he would be better equipped to rein in President Trump, easily the district’s top priority, than his more attention-grabbing competitors.
“Voters in this district, perhaps more than any other, understand that experience is a prerequisite to effective change making,” he said in an interview.
Barn-burning stuff? Maybe not. But it is a proposition that worked remarkably well for decades in this central swath of New York, New York, where one of the nation’s wealthiest, best-educated and most Democratic electorates has routinely foregone flash and fame to elect liberal policy heavyweights.
The question looming over Mr. Lasher’s campaign as the June 23 primary nears, though, is whether old-fashioned experience is still enough to win at a moment when many voters are furious with the very party establishment he has spent his career toiling in, and have increasingly embraced pugnacious populists.
Polls suggest the crowded contest may have narrowed to two candidates: Mr. Lasher and Alex Bores, a fellow state assemblyman. But some of Mr. Lasher’s allies voiced worries in interviews that their buttoned-up candidate was struggling to command voters’ attention, especially as his opponents try to repurpose less savory parts of his record as weapons.
“Micah is really the person that you need,” said one of his endorsers, Gov. David A. Paterson. “I’m just not sure how many people feel he’s the person that they want.”
Mr. Lasher’s opponents have taken very different campaign approaches. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, has virtually no professional experience but entered the race with 880,000 Instagram followers and has aggressively battered his rivals online. (Mr. Lasher has about 8,000 followers on the platform.)
George T. Conway III, the Trump resistance icon, was already a household name and has laser focused on Mr. Trump.
Then there is Mr. Bores, who has become Mr. Lasher’s most formidable rival by harnessing a single issue — growing fears about artificial intelligence — into national magazine profiles and podcast interviews. Millions of dollars in attacks from rival A.I. giants around his candidacy have further linked him to the issue.
Mr. Lasher has taken some steps to adapt. He hired Morris Katz, the strategist for left-leaning populists like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, to put an edgier tone on his ads. He likes to stress Democrats must be a “tougher fighting force.”
A $10 million pro-Lasher super PAC funded by one of his old bosses, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, seems to have cut both ways, helping raise Mr. Lasher’s profile while opening him to attacks that he is too cozy with a billionaire leader of the establishment.
Mostly, though, Mr. Lasher and his allies are betting that New York’s 12th District will be an exception to broader political trends that have favored left-leaning insurgents. The district is reliably liberal and fiercely anti-Trump, but Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, did not win it in last year’s primary. (Mr. Lasher endorsed him, but Mr. Mamdani is sitting out the House race.) It is home to relatively few young people and the largest Jewish population of any district in the country.
“It’s not the ‘Commie Corridor’ where they want someone who’s going to burn the system down,” said Erik Bottcher, a state senator from Chelsea, referring to a swath of western Queens and northern Brooklyn. “This is not the Instagram voter. It’s more of a Facebook voter.”
There is no question that Mr. Lasher, a fixture in New York Democratic circles for decades, possesses ample traditional qualifications.
He was barely out of braces when he began volunteering for local campaigns and was already a published author (a book on card tricks, “The Magic of Micah Lasher,” was published when he was 14). He founded a top-flight political consulting firm while an undergraduate at N.Y.U.
Afterward, he worked in ideologically diverse places: as an aide for Mr. Nadler; Mr. Bloomberg’s top negotiator in Albany; Gov. Kathy Hochul’s policy director; the manager of Scott Stringer’s (losing) mayoral campaign and a policy wonk for Google’s urban planning outfit.
Some who have worked closely with Mr. Lasher say he can be condescending in private, as if he believes he is the smartest man in the room. His defenders say that is because he usually is.
“I hate most politicians, and I love Micah,” said Gale Brewer, a local councilwoman. “No fluff. Everything he does is thought out.”
In a race with relatively few big policy disagreements among candidates — all, for example, want to disband U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and impeach Mr. Trump; Mr. Bores and Mr. Lasher both oppose legislation prohibiting weapons sales to Israel — Mr. Lasher has tried to use his record to distinguish himself.
For example, as chief of staff to Eric T. Schneiderman, then the New York attorney general, he helped coordinate a lawsuit against Mr. Trump and Trump University.
As Ms. Hochul’s top policy adviser, he helped write a landmark package of gun laws in 2022 in the hours after an 18-year-old white supremacist gunned down 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket.
And as an assemblyman, Mr. Lasher helped muscle legislation past business lobbyists that strengthened New York’s consumer protection statutes after Mr. Trump gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“We are not running to be a TikTok star or to be the head of an A.I. regulatory agency,” he said. “We are all running for a very specific job, which is that of a legislator who will be successful in making change.”
Of course, a long record offers baggage, too. Mr. Lasher’s opponents and a super PAC spending $2 million against him have latched onto other work that may alienate some voters.
Many labor unions still resent him for working for Mr. Bloomberg to enact statewide pension reforms more than a decade ago that gave newer teachers and other public employees less generous retirement benefits. They feel the same way about his role running a pro-charter school group, StudentsFirstNY, which fought to curb the influence of teachers’ unions.
“I think that was very hard for people to forget,” said Deborah Wright, the political director for the retail workers union.
Like most other large unions in the city, it is backing Mr. Bores instead.
Bertha Lewis, a founder of the left-leaning Working Families Party, published an opinion essay in The Amsterdam News, Manhattan’s historically Black newspaper, resurfacing Mr. Lasher’s role disseminating a racially divisive campaign leaflet for a mayoral candidate in 2001, when he was 19. He has repeatedly apologized.
Ms. Lewis also accused him of being the “chief architect” of Mr. Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policing strategy, which overwhelmingly targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers — a claim that has been widely recirculated but does not stand up to scrutiny.
While Mr. Lasher was Mr. Bloomberg’s director of legislative affairs, he did write a memo opposing a bill related to the tactic. But the policy itself was developed years before he joined City Hall. As for the memo, Mr. Lasher says he was simply doing his job as the mayor’s representative, and personally views the tactic as “horrific policy.”
“I did not agree with every position taken by everyone that I worked for,” he said. “Or that every one of those positions was right at the time, or that every one of those positions looks right in retrospect.”
With early voting underway, New Yorkers are wading through the barrage of campaign ads and mailers — and often coming to different conclusions.
“Too much Bloomberg money,” one man muttered as he passed Mr. Lasher and Mr. Nadler at the farmers market.
A few days earlier, in Chelsea, Brian Lonergan, 49, said he had thought about supporting Mr. Bores, but with all the A.I. attacks and counterattacks concluded there was “too much controversy around there for me.”
Mr. Lasher felt like the right fit.
“We might not agree on every detail, he said. “Micah is kind of like an old-fashioned pragmatist and a guy who will just focus on the issues and legislating.”
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