EXCLUSIVE: Whether heading into Chicago or leaving it behind on the Stevenson Expressway, commuters are driving past a new billboard campaign from Florida's top business lobby.
Expanding its multimillion-dollar recruitment campaign into the Midwest, the Florida Chamber of Commerce is launching its next "Free Enterprise" billboard campaign targeting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as the Chamber says data shows billions of dollars in income moving from Illinois to Florida.
"The billboards will look very much like the billboard we did in New York, but we'll have two of them in Chicago, and we'll be naming Governor Pritzker the runner-up ‘Florida Economic Developer of the Year,’" Florida Chamber President and CEO Mark Wilson exclusively told Fox News Digital.
"This isn't personal, right? This is about policy. And the person responsible for all of Illinois's policies is the governor there, just like our governor in Florida has top responsibility for what we do here," he added. "When we look at how unsafe Chicago is, when we look at the extraordinarily high taxes that we have in Chicago — I'm from there, by the way, and so I have firsthand knowledge on what's happening in Illinois and what's happening in Chicago… And all of Illinois is losing people, more businesses are leaving Illinois than are moving to Illinois, and Illinois is losing billions of taxable income. And so the whole state is in a death spiral."
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An image of Pritzker shrugging can be seen on billboards facing traffic in both directions along I-55, with the ads naming him runner-up and thanking him for jobs moving to Florida. Their launch comes just over one month after the Chamber named New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani Florida's "Economic Developer of the Year" as part of a Times Square campaign. The Chamber says the campaigns are intended to argue that progressive tax and economic policies encourage wealth, businesses and families to move to Florida.
"Everything we do is scorecard driven, and we follow the data," Wilson said when asked why Chicago was the next stop on the campaign. "New York earned the number one spot, and if you look at the data, Illinois earns the number two spot… Florida's grown by about 1.9 million residents and Illinois's lost [75,000] or 100,000 residents over the same period of time… When we look at taxable income that's moved from Illinois to Florida, it's over $2 billion that has left Illinois and relocated to Florida."
Wilson also pointed to high-profile corporate exits from Chicago — most notably billionaire Ken Griffin moving hedge fund giant Citadel to Miami — as evidence for his argument that crime and tax burdens can drive employers out of the state.
"When bullet holes emerged in the Citadel building in Chicago, that was sort of one of the straws, right? You can't decriminalize things and then tell everybody you have a safer community... people don't buy that, and it's not true," the CEO noted.
"They're raising taxes on the very people that are investing in manufacturing, they're investing in the community. And in fact, people like Ken Griffin are investing hundreds of millions of dollars and philanthropy into public education into making our communities safer," he continued. "This is about: bad policy in Illinois is moving Illinois in the wrong direction. It's made Illinois less safe, it's made it less competitive, and it's made it a more expensive place to be."
The campaign isn't just targeting hedge funds and billionaires — Wilson said the Chamber is directly courting Illinois' advanced manufacturing, aviation and tech startup sectors.
"Advanced manufacturing, for example, is one of our top priorities in Florida. We're one of the only states with a chief manufacturing officer," Wilson explained. "Florida is currently the No. 1 state in the country for new business startups. So as people are coming up with good ideas in Illinois only to have their government policies quash them, we want them to know that they're more than welcome here in the Sunshine State."
According to Wilson, the initial Times Square campaign pushed the Chamber’s overall earned-media valuation to more than $100 million. While he declined to disclose how much the Chamber is spending on the billboards, he said, "it takes millions of dollars a year to do what the Florida Chamber of Commerce does."
"In Illinois, what we're hoping is that the governor's office reflects on the data," Wilson said. "Illinois has half as many people as Florida, but their budget and their debt is significantly larger than Florida… And what we hope to hear is that Illinois wants to take us up on our offer to join forces and introduce free enterprise into every aspect of Illinois. The people of Illinois deserve that. The businesses of Illinois deserve that."
Gov. Pritzker did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Looking ahead, Wilson acknowledged that Florida's rapid economic boom brings a heavy responsibility for state and business leaders to avoid the very pitfalls currently plaguing northern hubs.
"The biggest risk to the Florida model is that we allow to happen in Florida, what leaders in Illinois, New York and California allowed to happen there," Wilson warned. "If you go back a few decades, California was a national leader. Everybody wanted to be like California... and they let it go."
Wilson said Florida's growth brings a responsibility for state and business leaders to avoid problems he sees in states including Illinois, New York and California.
"I often hear a refrain of, ‘Hey, at least we're not Illinois or California or New York.’ And the challenge is we need to compare ourselves to Florida's potential, right? Florida versus Florida."
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Though the Chicago billboards will remain active along I-55 for just one week, Wilson said the Free Enterprise Florida campaign will continue, with additional states potentially targeted.
"Our goal in all of this is to give a wake-up call to the residents of these states," Wilson said. "We want America to win. And if you want to look at the future of what America can look like, you look no further than what Florida has done."
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