On a plane in 1987, political consultant Clint Reilly settled on a slogan for a long shot congressional candidate: "A Voice That Will Be Heard." It carried Nancy Pelosi into Congress by fewer than 4,000 votes and set the tone for a career that took Reilly from campaign war rooms to a mayoral run of his own to ownership of two of San Francisco's storied newspapers. Reilly died Sunday, July 19, 2026, at 79.

He was the oldest of ten children in a working class Catholic family, born in Oakland and raised across the bay in San Leandro. He studied for the priesthood at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy, and left three years before he would have been ordained. In his early twenties he ran a waterfront curio shop in San Francisco and lent his energy to Cesar Chavez's farmworker movement, the first sign of the political appetite that would define the next half century of his life.

In the 1970s Reilly founded Clinton Reilly Campaigns and helped invent a new kind of political consulting shop, one that housed polling, direct mail, television advertising, data processing, fundraising and grassroots organizing under a single roof. He built a client list that came to include Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and by his own organization's account he was the only consultant in the state to defeat two recall elections, guiding Feinstein through a 1983 attempt to unseat her as mayor and State Senate President Pro Tempore David Roberti through a recall fight a decade later.

His highest profile early test came in 1987, when Pelosi, then a Democratic National Committee member with no record in elected office, hired him for her first congressional race. Reilly believed her opponent, Supervisor Harry Britt, had the better chance. He wrote the slogan anyway, plastered it across San Francisco on billboards, and produced a television ad, rare for a congressional campaign at the time, set against images of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Capitol. When an ad man on his team questioned the wisdom of running a first-time candidate on connections and effectiveness alone, Reilly told him, "That's exactly right," according to Molly Ball's account published by the Sabato's Crystal Ball political newsletter. Pelosi won by a margin of roughly 3,990 votes out of 105,000 cast.

Reilly kept working the machinery of San Francisco politics through the early 1990s, helping Mayor Frank Jordan keep the Giants from leaving the city in 1992 and steering a $52 million Asian Art Museum bond to passage in 1994. In 1999 he ran for mayor himself, losing to incumbent Willie Brown. Reflecting on Reilly's death decades later, Brown told the San Francisco Standard that his former rival "was able and dedicated. And committed."

Reilly left political consulting in 1995, the same year he bought the landmark Merchants Exchange building in San Francisco's Financial District from Walter Shorenstein and the Swig family, turning its ballroom into the Julia Morgan Ballroom event space and later opening the Italian restaurant Credo on the ground floor. In 2000 he sued Hearst Corporation in federal court in an attempt to block its acquisition of the San Francisco Chronicle, an early skirmish in a newspaper industry consolidation fight that would draw him back in two decades later.

He returned to publishing as an owner rather than a critic, buying the Nob Hill Gazette in 2016 and, in January 2021, the San Francisco Examiner, becoming the paper's sixth owner. "When you have a one newspaper town, you have homogeneous opinions," he told the San Francisco Public Press in December 2020, weeks before the acquisition closed. "When you have newspaper competition, you have competitive points of view on the same set of facts, the same events." Brandon Heist, head of business operations at the Clint Reilly Organization, said in a statement carried by the San Francisco Examiner that "our entire team is heartbroken by the loss of our owner and founder, Clint Reilly."

Away from politics and publishing, Reilly funneled his fortune into Bay Area classrooms. He founded the Bay Scholars program in 2008, which paid tuition for low income students to attend private, college preparatory high schools in the Bay Area. In 2001 he became the first layperson to chair the board of Catholic Charities and its CYO program in San Francisco, a role in which he helped raise more than $6 million through the archdiocese's annual Loaves and Fishes dinner. He and his wife, Janet, were inducted together into the Bay Area Council's Business Hall of Fame, and he sat on the Matsui Center Advisory Committee at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies. He lived in San Francisco's Seacliff neighborhood with Janet and their daughters, Jill and Ava, who survive him.

Reilly's fingerprints are still on the city he spent his life arguing over: the Examiner masthead he bought to keep a second daily voice in San Francisco, the ballroom he carved out of a century old exchange building, the scholarships that carried students through high schools they could not otherwise have afforded, and the integrated, data driven approach to campaigns, what his own firm called the "California School," that he built from a single shop in the 1970s. The slogan he wrote on a plane in 1987 turned out to describe his own instinct as much as his client's candidacy: he kept finding causes, campaigns and institutions that needed a voice, and he kept giving them one.