With a month away from Election Day, a compounding series of challenges that are converging all at once for the White House and the Kamala Harris campaign — port workers are striking, fighting in the Middle East is escalating, and Hurricane Helene has ravaged parts of the southern and eastern U.S. — have to be approached not defensively, but as opportunities to provide practical leadership to the American people.

Reflecting back on the past year makes me think that too many who make the case for a popular or peoples front — I prefer coalition — understand the concept schematically and abstractly. They are capable of elucidating its textbook version, but fail to understand how it expresses itself concretely at this moment and the role therein of progressive and left leaning people in this expansive coalition.

It’s hardly stepping out on a limb to say that Trump is irretrievably racist and that he’s doubling, tripling down on racism in these closing weeks of the campaign. What should also be uncontroversial is that his nearly exclusive base of white supporters marinate in the most egregious forms of racism too. This deepening racialization of his supporters — not least white workers and young white males — constitutes a longer term obstacle to the struggle for equality, unity, and social progress as well as an immediate challenge for the far flung coalition now in the home stretch to elect Kamala Harris. Any dismissal or downgrading of this danger should be a cause for concern for democratic and progressive minded people.