HispanicBusiness

data this year, including Georgia, Virginia and Illinois Republican state parties, Bositis said.

Bositis said the GOP needs to broaden its appeal to minority voters or face irrelevance in the coming years as America becomes more diverse.

"The Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off," he said.

He noted, "They should have been adapting all along -- I've said that before -- but right now they'll do no such thing. They're afraid of their current voters, not their future voters. Their current voters are old and white."

GOP pollster Whit Ayres has been pushing the party to appeal more to Latinos. They are not monolithic -- Cuban-Americans tend to lean Republican, while Mexican-Americans are more Democratic, for example -- but Ayres said Republicans can draw in more Latino voters if they try.

"We need to adopt a tone that talks about Hispanics as voters we want in the Republican coalition rather than folks to run against," Ayres said, referring to the charged politics of immigration policy.

Ayres said Republican outreach must occur in substance and tone, and he pointed to Florida Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio's work on immigration reform as a possible path forward.

Republicans in Congress have defeated Democrats' "Dream Act," which would give a path to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children who go to college or serve in the military. Rubio would give them a visa but not citizenship.

Obama this summer put out a controversial executive order deferring deportation for those immigrants. The action "cut [Rubio] off at the knees," Ayres said.

Rubio, who will introduce Romney on Thursday night, is one of several minority Republican stars in Florida. The state's lieutenant governor, Jennifer Carroll, is a black native of the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Cuban-Americans such as Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have long been a force in the state GOP.

"We've got a lot of diversity in this state's Republican Party because Florida is also such a microcosm and melting pot," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. "It makes a lot of sense to have the convention staged in Florida, but I think it's very important to put a younger and more diverse face on the party."

Nationally, the party is struggling to attract nonwhite voters.

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Obama leading Romney 94 percent to 0 percent among black voters, and ahead by a two-to-one margin with Latino voters.

Herman Cain, the black McDonough businessman who ran in the Republican presidential primary, challenged the notion that no black voters will vote for Romney at a Tampa rally Sunday night, asking for the black "zeroes" in the crowd to stand with him.

In an interview Cain said the polls do not reflect what he hears anecdotally in the black community and that minority voters are moved by the same thing as white voters: the economy.

"Let me tell you what black people care about -- green," Cain said. "Green as in business success. Green as in a successful corporate career. Green as in being able to start a business and having a legitimate chance of making it succeed. That is the best outreach program you can have to blacks, Hispanics, Jewish-Americans, Asian-Americans, any ethic group. The best outreach programs are programs that lead to economic success."