Reddit mentions of The Emerging Democratic Majority

Follow the moneyincentive gradient.

I think this question is something that people assume they know, but few people have real answers.

When it comes to immigration, there has been a very strong recent change on the matter by Democrats:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/15/americans-views-of-immigrants-marked-by-widening-partisan-generational-divides/
>Between 1994 and 2005, Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of immigrants tracked one another closely. Beginning around 2006, however, they began to diverge. In October that year, the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats grew to 15 percentage points. Since then, the share of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents saying that immigrants strengthen the country steadily increased, from 49% then to 78% now, while the share with this view among Republicans and Republican leaners has shown little change (34% then, 35% today).

Democrats now think that immigrants strengthen this country, but this is a recent opinion for them. Unfortunately, Pew does not track the opinions on illegal immigration in this article back before 2013, which means it doesn't capture if this change was also about illegal immigrants. I believe it does, but that's a guess.

For comparison, I found this article on the immigration debate in the 90s. I believe it shows that Democrats have recently changed their opinion on illegal immigration and that this is a new policy. However, while it shows that immigration was highly debated, it lacks any clear polls on Democratic opinions.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/dittgen.html

There are probably at least two reasons for the change, one honest and one cynical.

First, research shows that immigrants eventually end up as economic net positives.
https://clas.berkeley.edu/research/immigration-economic-benefits-immigration

Second, the crass reason. In 2001 there was a book predicting an "inevitable demographic majority" that would put the Democrats permanently in power. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0036QVPEU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Since the article was published, the pundits have gone back and forth on whether the book is right, but over and over the book comes back up in major media. When the Republicans win, the "emerging democratic majority" is either unreliable, or too far away in the future to count on. When Democrats win, the majority is here and we never have to worry about Republicans again (until they win again, then the pundits think the sky is falling anew.)

A series of articles through the years to demonstrate that this book and its prediction is repeatedly brought up, and thus people are probably aware of it:
2016
2015
2014
2012
2011
2010
2009

TLDR: The support of illegal immigrants is mostly recent and is driven, like a lot of things, by the partisan political divide. The Democrats are supportive of all types of immigration today, and they have very good valid reasons for it, but also a belief that immigration will give them political power.

First thing's first...

>Twenty years later, we are still told by important professors and politicians that ‘identity politics’ are dangerous, a genuine threat to civilization. Rather than the Jewish thinkers of the Frankfurt School, an idea with roots in anti-Semitic ‘cultural bolshevism,’ the new intellectual source for mainstream right-wingers is now ‘postmodernism’ — a dubious source given post-modern’s distinctive brand of skepticism towards all-encompassing systems.

That is a filthy lie.

1. "Cultural bolshevism" was only about art, it was about targeting art that was perceived as "subversive" by the Nazi State and nothing to do with political movements attacking cultural institutions
   
2. Google's Ngram Viewer reveals that the term associated with this, "cultural marxism" has no connection whatsoever with "cultural bolshevism", appearing decades after WWII in the era of the New Left
   
   Now that this is done, the author is doing one big sleight of hand... pretending that because Republicans leveraged identity politics to win the South back in the 70s that they and they alone bear the fault for identity politics today. This is a form of whataboutism, trying to deflect criticism by pretending someone else did something similar first.
   
   The reality is that both can be true: Republicans can have leaned on white identity politics to gain the South AND leftist activists can be deeply involved in identity politics today for political gains. These are not mutually exclusive claims, and the author's whole argument hinges entirely on the reader accepting the implied statement that they are mutually exclusive. The author also pretends that this flirtation with "white identity politics" has never ended in the Republican party, which is not at all supported in hist text nor in reality.
   
   The facts are that leftist thinkers have been harping about "The Emerging Democatic Majority" and the "Coaltition of the Ascendant", focusing on identity politics to attract the votes of rising demographics of college-educated women, ethnic minorities and the like to fashion a new coalition. Just saying "buh the Republicans did it too decades ago!" is not a defense.