Florida Chamber Gives J.B. Pritzker ‘Runner-Up’ for ‘Economic Developer Of The Year’ Award on Chicago Billboards
23rd September 2026
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.”