Already, California, Illinois and New York are lost. The GOP has not carried any of the four in six presidential elections. When Texas – where whites are a minority and a declining share of the population – tips, how does the GOP put together an electoral majority? [MORE] From [HERE]  Following Mitt Romney's loss on Tuesday, some Republicans have talked about the need to reach out to the rising demographic in order to stay competitive growing forward. Among them was Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who said in a statement posted on his Facebook page on Wednesday that the Republican Party needs to "work harder than ever” to communicate with minority and immigrant groups. 

A fast-spreading emerging edict on what Republicans need to do to appeal to Hispanic voters is that they need – really need – Latinos in their party like Sen. Marco Rubio.

Many pundits and other political observers believe that if Republicans have more Rubios, and give them more of the spotlight, it will undo the off-putting image of the party as one of out-of-touch older, Anglo men who cannot empathize or sympathize with most Americans. And with a Latino front and center, the emerging conventional wisdom goes, Republicans will cease to be written off by Latinos as being against them. [MORE] 

“If there's a winner tonight, it's the Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio,” said conservative columnist George Will in a television interview on Election Day after President Obama was declared the winner, “because all eyes are now going to be turned to him as a man who might have a way to broaden the demographic appeal of this party."

But Latino leaders are saying: “Not so fast.”

The answer, they say, is not to trot out more Latinos to try to build good will, but to embrace and push for policies that address issues of concern to the voting bloc that is believed to have been pivotal to the president’s re-election.

Rubio, like some other Latino Republicans who have had high profiles in the last year, is a Tea Party conservative, and that – not his ethnicity – is what shapes Latinos’ view of him, political experts say.

Intensifying the visibility of Rubio and other Latino Republicans is “not enough,” said Clarissa Martinez, director of civic engagement and immigration at the National Council of La Raza, or NCLR, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil right group.

“We’re thinking that it’s tremendously important the that number of Latino elected officials in the Republican Party is growing,” Martinez said, but added that Republicans need to rethink policies that run counter to the interests of Latinos. [MORE]