EXCLUSIVE: Whether heading into Chicago or leaving it behind on the Stevenson Expressway, commuters are driving past a new billboard campaign from Florida\u2019s top business lobby.<\/p>\n
Expanding its multimillion-dollar recruitment campaign into the Midwest, the Florida Chamber of Commerce is launching its next \u201cFree Enterprise\u201d billboard campaign targeting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker<\/a> as the Chamber says data shows billions of dollars in income moving from Illinois to Florida.<\/p>\n \u201cThe billboards will look very much like the billboard we did in New York, but we\u2019ll have two of them in Chicago, and we\u2019ll be naming Governor Pritzker the runner-up \u2018Florida Economic Developer of the Year,\u2019\u201d Florida Chamber President and CEO Mark Wilson exclusively told Fox News Digital.<\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t personal, right? This is about policy. And the person responsible for all of Illinois\u2019s policies is the governor there, just like our governor in Florida has top responsibility for what we do here,\u201d he added. \u201cWhen we look at how unsafe Chicago is, when we look at the extraordinarily high taxes that we have in Chicago \u2014 I\u2019m from there, by the way, and so I have firsthand knowledge on what\u2019s happening in Illinois and what\u2019s happening in Chicago\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker speaks at a Texas Democratic Party press conference ahead of the Republican National Convention, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, in Dallas. AP Photo\/Gabriela Passos<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201cEconomic Developer of the Year\u201d as part of a Times Square campaign. <\/a>The Chamber says the campaigns are intended to argue that progressive tax and economic policies encourage wealth, businesses and families to move to Florida.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything we do is scorecard driven, and we follow the data,\u201d Wilson said when asked why Chicago was the next stop on the campaign. \u201cNew York earned the number one spot, and if you look at the data, Illinois earns the number two spot\u2026 Florida\u2019s grown by about 1.9 million residents and Illinois\u2019s lost [75,000] or 100,000 residents over the same period of time\u2026 When we look at taxable income that\u2019s moved from Illinois to Florida, it\u2019s over $2 billion that has left Illinois and relocated to Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilson also pointed to high-profile corporate exits from Chicago \u2014 most notably billionaire Ken Griffin moving hedge fund giant Citadel to Miami \u2014 as evidence for his argument that crime and tax burdens can drive employers out of the state.<\/p>\n Visitors pose for photographs in front of the Cloud Gate sculpture as it reflects the skyline in Chicago, Illinois, Thursday, August 1, 2024. AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cWhen bullet holes emerged in the Citadel building in Chicago, that was sort of one of the straws, right? You can\u2019t decriminalize things and then tell everybody you have a safer community\u2026 people don\u2019t buy that, and it\u2019s not true,\u201d the CEO noted.<\/p>\n