How Marco Rubio can help Mitt Romney without spot on GOP ticket

“We’re continuing to work on it, but there’s a lot of details and we want to get it right, so I don’t have a timeframe yet,” says Rubio spokesman Alex Conant. “Kyl and Hutchison have been working on their own legislation; we’ve been in touch with their offices.”

Democrats are already dismissing the anticipated GOP version, calling it “DREAM Act Lite” or “DREAM Act without the dream.”

But Republican strategists hope that if their party can be seen as sympathetic and solution-oriented on this emotional issue, Latinos can get to the rest of their message.

“Hispanics are concerned with the economy first and foremost, but if they perceive a party and its candidates to be hostile to an issue like immigration reform, it disallows the conversation to move forward in any meaningful way,” Danny Diaz, an aide to McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, told The Hill newspaper last month. “Republicans have been hurt by the tone and tenor of the conversation. There’s no disputing that.”

As the lead advocate for a GOP-sponsored DREAM Act, Rubio could help Romney overcome Hispanic resistance to his candidacy, Republicans say.

In Romney’s remarks Sunday night at a fundraiser in Palm Beach, Fla., the presumptive GOP nominee said he and other Republicans will make the case that theirs is the party of “opportunity,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Romney typically has been adamant about vetoing the existing version of the DREAM Act, but in January he showed a willingness to compromise. At a Republican debate, he said he would support legislation that provided legal status to some undocumented immigrants who join the US military.

Republicans don’t need to win a majority of the Latino vote to win the presidency, they just need to hit 40 percent – a benchmark that the second President Bush reached in both of his campaigns. Large swaths of the Latino vote, the largest minority voting bloc, are located in states that are already solidly red or blue (Texas, California, and New York). But several key battleground states have large Hispanic populations, starting with Florida and including Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Virginia.

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