De Blasio targets outer boroughs, sees uptick on Google Analytics
Bill de Blasio. Dan Rosenblum
1:52 pm Jul. 19, 2012
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio's office says recent traffic trends on the public advocate's website demonstrate increased engagement with the outer boroughs.
Since June 25, de Blasio's public advocate site has had approximately 32,000 unique visitors, his office told Capital. Before that, the site was averaging between 15-20,000 uniques a month.
De Blasio's spokesman said the additional traffic could be related to what he said had been the office's increased focus recently on a number of issues of particular interest to the outer boroughs.
De Blasio, who lives in Park Slope, called for Macy's to bring fireworks back to the East River, in an appeal to Brooklyn and Queens voters who don't have a view of the West Side.
He's kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism of the city's new automated water meter system, which he says has led to substantial overcharges, particularly from residents of the outer boroughs.
Following reports of a sex offender groping girls in the children's section of a library in Queens, he joined a Queens councilman, Peter Vallone Jr., in calling for the ban of sex offenders from such locations.
And de Blasio's annual worst landlords list, which got 50,000 page views, according to Google Analytics, named 50 really bad landlords, whose holdings tended to be concentrated in the outer boroughs and upper Manhattan. (De Blasio's spokesman sent me a screen-shot of the numbers.)
“We’re connecting on bread and butter issues that people actually care about," said de Blasio's spokesman, Wiley Norvell, in a statement. "What they all have in common is they resonate on a neighborhood level—inflated water bills, making libraries safe, protecting tenants. Bill lives and breathes this stuff, and it resonates with people because they don’t feel heard on these issues at City Hall.”
Two of de Blasio's primary rivals for mayor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Borough President Scott Stringer, are Manhattan Democrats. De Blasio, who will also likely be competing with John Liu of Queens and Bill Thompson of Brooklyn, will presumably need a considerably chunk of the outer-borough vote if he's to achieve a top-two finish that would produce a runoff in the not-unlikely event that no candidate gets to 40 percent.
I contacted the other campaigns to see if they might provide any comparable data.
Quinn's campaign spokesman, Josh Isay, responded by pointing to Quinn's Twitter feed, which had, at last count, 10,595 followers, versus de Blasio's 4,826.
The Council's main page got approximately 60,000 unique visitors in June, according to the speaker's office.
First-time candidate Tom Allon, the C.E.O. of Manhattan Media and a resident of the Upper West Side, replied that, as far as the outer boroughs are concerned, he's been holding "Talk to Tom" meetings in all five of them, including, recently, in Greenpoint, Tremont and Woodside.
The other campaigns had no comment.
