Meet Michael Quirk


My story doesn’t start in a boardroom or a law school. It starts in the shadow of the Indiana steel mills.

The Kid Who Didn’t Fit the System

I was born in Peoria, Illinois, to unmarried teenage parents who placed me for adoption through Catholic Charities, and into the arms of the family that gave me my name and my life. I grew up a Quirk in the working-class south suburbs of Chicago: my father a United States Marine during the Kennedy years who went on to a career in federal labor relations, my mother a substitute teacher who built a career as a computer programmer and became a leader in her field. In our family, we still joke that technology is "the family business."

School was another matter. In second grade I was diagnosed with dyslexia. My father was a Marine, so I already knew the answer: improvise, adapt, overcome. I built the workarounds I needed and I still use them. What I could not do was learn the way school wanted me to. I lost a close friend I'd known most of my life to suicide when I was sixteen and then lost a best friend to suicide a few years later. I got through it the hard way and I wouldn't want anyone else to have to. Those years are why I don't treat mental health as a talking point and why I fight for care that reaches people before the silence does.

After my first friend passed, high school was pretty much over for me. My parents took me out of school and straight into community college to earn my GED. I went to work apprenticing with my uncle at the Indiana steel mills, carrying a union card years before I was technically old enough to have one. I earned my GED shortly after my classmates graduated. Then I went to work in technology, and I never stopped.

A Single Dad at 24

When my son was barely a year old, I was given temporary custody. After a long court process, I was granted sole custody, at age 24. I began life placed for adoption by parents too young to raise me; at nearly the same age, I chose to raise my son myself, no matter what it cost. I raised him alone from toddler to high school graduation: in San Francisco at the height of the dot-com boom, then back home in Chicago so he could grow up surrounded by family. The young man I raised chose to serve his country in U.S. Army Military Intelligence, and today he's earning his college degree on the GI Bill. My father, my uncles, and now my son have worn the uniform. I was raised in the Catholic faith, saw my son baptized and through catechism at the very parish where I grew up, a faith I carry with me today.

Thirty Years Protecting What America Runs On

I became the person institutions called when critical systems have to work, and the one they call at 3 a.m. when they don't. I started in Silicon Valley, where I built my first data center and a four-building technology campus during the dot-com years. That work brought me home, first to Merrill Lynch, where I spent the days after September 11 working from Chicago to restore services in New York so American markets could reopen. At Northern Trust I built the bank's first new data center in a decade, and that experience took me to United Airlines to build their next-generation data center. Then the Continental merger happened and the job got bigger: I helped merge the technology of two of the largest airlines in the world, took on architecture and engineering for network and security infrastructure worldwide, and led the teams that restored operations when a computer failure grounded flights across the globe. The last decade took me back to startups and tech companies, private equity and venture capital funded. A merger between a UK company and a Chicago company put me in London for a year. Since then I've been working with tech companies racing to adopt AI, and that's where my focus currently lands: cybersecurity, data privacy, and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Choosing Florida

The next chapter of my life is here in Florida. I came for the same reason I went to San Jose in the 1990s: this is where the energy is. Between Tampa and Orlando and Miami, Florida is becoming one of the country's next technology and cybersecurity hubs, and I wanted to build in it rather than watch it from somewhere else. So I started my own cybersecurity firm, Securipolis, headquartered here in Sarasota with clients across the country. I'm still new. I'm still meeting people and rebuilding a network I spent three decades building in Chicago. I carry the same work with me: I chair the Central Florida chapter of the International Association of Privacy Professionals and serve on the board of Tampa InfraGard.

Why I’m Running

I’ve voted in every election of my adult life: almost always Republican, with exactly one crossover: Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. The first campaign that made me believe an outsider could take on both parties was Ross Perot’s in 1992. In 2024, I voted for Donald Trump, and then I watched the promises break, while both parties carved up voters like territory in a redistricting arms race. Like millions of Americans, I found myself politically homeless. So I stopped waiting for someone else to fix it.

I’m running as an independent (No Party Affiliation) because this district deserves a representative who answers to its people, not to a party machine or corporate donors. From the City of Sarasota through Nokomis, Osprey, and Englewood, down to Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda, in Congress I will fight to:

I know what it’s like to struggle, to start over, to raise a family alone, and to build something from nothing. I’ve spent my life protecting the systems America depends on. Now I’m asking for the chance to protect the people.