EthnicMajority

(CNN) – Republican K. Carl Smith is African-American and he knows that the GOP's racial reckoning won't come from 100-page reports from party headquarters with carefully worded prescriptions about "outreach" to "demographic partners."

Instead, the type of sea change needed to shake the GOP's image as a party of old, white and culturally-insulated men will require the type of profound grassroots shakeup that might make some in the GOP uneasy.

"You got your establishment Republicans who want to keep things the same," said Smith, an Army veteran who grew up in Alabama during the Civil Rights era. "The status quo needs to go through some, I won't say diversity classes, but I'll say liberty classes and learn about helping people on the bottom of the ladder."

He said the party also has to deal with small but noisy elements that co-opt any message of inclusiveness if it wants to win the "propaganda battle."

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(Reuters) – A top U.S. Republican lawmaker said on Sunday he would support granting citizenship to children who are undocumented in the country in a sign that conservatives who oppose immigration amnesty will be playing defense as Congress takes on immigration reform in the coming months.

Representative Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House of Representatives, said Congress could make quick progress on immigration if lawmakers agreed to give citizenship to children – an idea he opposed when it came up for a vote in 2010 as the DREAM Act.

"The best place to begin, I think, is with the children. Let's go ahead and get that under our belt, put a win on the board," Cantor said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Cantor is leading an effort to improve his party's image as many Republicans worry they will be consigned to irrelevancy in coming years if they do not reach out to the fast-growing Latino electorate, which strongly supports immigration reform.

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(Huffington Post) The year 2012 will be remembered as the year of the rise of the Latino voter. The demographic shift changing the shape of U.S. politics was felt as never before, as both parties reached out to Hispanic voters and cultivated new faces like Marco Rubio and Julian Castro.

Hispanics jumped from 6 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2012 as a share of the electorate, helping tip the election in favor of President Barack Obama after Romney won just 27 percent of the Latino vote.

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(Atlantic) After Republicans filled every House leadership position with old white dudes, Speaker of the House John Boehner changed course on Friday afternoon by adding some diversity — emphasis on the "some." Boehner has tapped Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI), Talking Points Memo reports, to head up the House Administration Committee, where she'll oversee stuff like operatings costs, taxpayer dollars, and technology training.

Earlier in the week, House Republicans filled all 19 positions in their new committee chairs with 19 old, white men, which they were admonished for quite roundly. Adding Miller to the mix doesn't exactly level the playing field, but the GOP still does need a chair of the House Ethics Committee, so there's that.

(People's World) Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, demonstrated the difficulty his party has with the concept of diversity yesterday when he announced the names of the 19 people who will chair all of the major committees in the new Congress.

They are all white men and most of them are millionaires.

Rep, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the defeated vice presidential candidate, will continue to chair the powerful House budget committee, despite having exhausted the six-year term limit. The GOP lifted the rules to allow him to continue in that post.

They did not change the rules however when it came to a woman. The one female chair that House Republicans have, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, has to step down because her term is up.

The failure to include even a single woman or member of a minority group surprised many in the Capitol here who noted they would have expected something different from a Republican Party that had just been so soundly rejected by women and minority voters.

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(Politico) After an election in which Mitt Romney lost the black, Asian and Latino vote by landslide margins, the news just got worse for the Republican Party.

With Florida GOP Rep. Allen West’s concession Tuesday, the face of the GOP got a little whiter, ending an election season in which the already undersized contingent of black, Hispanic and Asian Republicans in Congress grew even smaller.

For a party that’s struggling to present a public face that looks more like America, the 2012 election represents something close to a worst-case scenario.

The number of African-American Republicans in Congress, which stood to double thanks to several highly competitive candidates, was instead cut in half, to a single member. The last Asian-American Republican retired and wasn’t replaced. In a year when a record number of Hispanics were elected to Congress, House Republicans ended up losing two of their already small contingent. Puerto Rico GOP Gov. Luis Fortuño, a rising star who campaigned for Mitt Romney in Florida, was another 2012 casualty.

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(Washington Post) Republicans’ emerging problem with Latino voters looks even worse when you factor in the electoral college.

A look at Latino population trends in swing and key red states shows just how ominous the GOP’s future could be if it doesn’t do something about its current struggles with Latino voters.

We noted yesterday that nationwide population and minority voting trends paint a haunting picture for the GOP. But the problem is particularly acute because of the states where Latino growth has been strongest — particularly several key swing states and red states that Democrats are hoping to put in play in the coming elections.

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(CNN) At the Council on Foreign relations this week,Sen. Marco Rubio talked tough on the international hotspot of the day, Syria.

"It's time to act now. I don't want to score political points on this issue, I want to see it resolved," Rubio told Time Magazine's Rick Stengel, the event's moderator.

Rubio says he doesn't want to score political points, but like it or not — every move he makes these days is viewed through one prism: a potential vice presidential pick for Mitt Romney.

For many Republicans, Rubio is prime running mate material — a fresh-faced, telegenic tea party favorite from Florida, a key battleground state.

And he is, of course, Hispanic — a fast-growing ethnic group in the United States, a group Democrats dominated in presidential elections over the past four decades.

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(PBS) With polls showing two-thirds of Latino voters supporting President Barack Obama for re-election, the Republican Party faces an uphill battle to capture the Hispanic electorate in November. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll released last week shows that less than a third of Latinos, 27 percent, are planning to back the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

The Democrats have been leading the way in reaching out to this growing group of voters, set to make up around 10 percent of the electorate at the end of this year. Mr. Obama has already spent $1 million on Spanish-language media over the last couple of weeks in states with growing Latino populations such as Florida, Colorado and Nevada. On the other hand, the Romney campaign has only just made its first Hispanic media buy, bringing the presumed GOP nominee's Spanish-language media investments to $13,000.

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(Los Angeles Times) Handsome, youthful, Cuban American and Republican, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has been mentioned repeatedly as a potential running mate for Mitt Romney — in part because of hopes that the presence of the first Latino on a major national ticket would draw that key voting group Romney's way.

But outside of his enormously important home state, the prospect for that sort of boost seems less than likely.

Some voters would probably be attracted by the idea of a Latino, any Latino, being that close to theWhite House. (Others, particularly Democrats and left-leaning independents, might never consider a vote for the GOP ticket.)

One complication is internal rivalries amid the diverse group of 22 million potential voters that, for demographic purposes, is treated as one unified electoral bloc.

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