This article is adapted from a case study commissioned by the Brookings Institution as part of its Profiles In Negotiation project. The full Brookings paper on the veterans deal is available here. Jill Lawrence is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.

This is the week where the Republican party's biggest 2016 challenge takes center stage. You can’t say Republicans haven't seen it coming. They’ve known for ages that Hispanics have the capacity to make or break them in 2016. Right now it’s looking more like break, unless a couple of potential saviors pull off a miracle—which is why former Gov. Jeb Bush went on Tuesday to Puerto Rico, not known for its early primary status.

If the GOP is to make any headway with Hispanic voters, analysts across the spectrum say two Floridians are the key. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American, is enjoying a surge of attention and polling popularity after announcing his candidacy this month. Bush is not Hispanic, despite his “oops” moment of checking off Hispanic on a voter form, but he may be an even better bet than Rubio. “He has the most potential,” UCLA professor Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions polling, says of Bush. “Historically, he’s been more moderate than Rubio has been on a host of Latino issues. And his family situation can’t be ignored.”


That family situation includes brother George W., who as president championed immigration and education reforms important to Hispanics, as well as Bush’s own immediate family. “ I know the immigrant experience because I married a beautiful girl from Mexico. My children are bicultural and bilingual,” Jeb Bush said Tuesday at Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan.

The trip to Puerto Rico was followed Wednesday by a keynote speech to the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference in Houston. In San Juan, Bush talked about statehood and rum in Spanish and English. In Texas, it was education and immigration, in Spanish and English. Boxes, checked.

Rubio is an eloquent speaker who can reach “these Latinos who don’t really feel that the party’s talking to them,” says Stephen Nuno, a Northern Arizona University professor who is writing a book about Latinos and the GOP. “Unfortunately for Marco Rubio, Bush can make the same speech in the same language to the same people, and he comes with a little more gravitas.”

A Bush aide notes that in addition to his Mexican ties, Bush spent six months in Puerto Rico running his father’s 1980 campaign, and before that lived in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was a vice president and branch manager for Texas Commerce Bank. “The governor does have the ability to resonate culturally within the different groups in the Hispanic community. He understands how to communicate within the different sectors,” the aide says.

Puerto Ricans have a growing presence in Florida and are key to winning elections there. From Bush’s standpoint, it’s also potentially relevant that there are nearly 34 million Mexican-Americans scattered across the country. That compares with about 2 million Cuban-Americans who are concentrated ( 70 percent) in Florida and who have enjoyed a warmer welcome—residency, green cards, citizenship—than other groups.

Still, Rubio is now discussing his roots in a way that could resonate with the larger immigrant community. He ran into trouble a few years back when it turned out that, contrary to how he understood his family history, his parents did not come to America to escape Fidel Castro’s 1959 Communist revolution. They actually came earlier, to escape poverty and build better lives. As Rubio put it in announcing his presidential bid, “My father became a bartender. My mother a cashier, a maid and a Kmart stock clerk. They never made it big. But they were successful.”

That’s a classic American Dream saga that speaks directly to the aspirations of many a Mexican or Central American immigrants in places like Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina and his own home of Florida. In other words, the states that could well decide the 2016 presidential election.

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Yet the primary and general election seasons are riddled with political traps—some Republicans set for themselves, some laid by President Obama—that could well make gains with Hispanic voters in the 2016 cycle more difficult than ever.

The problem began with GOP recalcitrance on immigration reform, despite pleas from party elders after the 2012 election to get behind comprehensive fixes that included legal status and a complicated path to citizenship for many of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. From there, the dominoes fell. The House killed a bipartisan Senate reform bill. Obama responded with a series of executive actions designed to shield millions from deportation. Republicans and conservatives filed lawsuits to stop him. Courts blocked Obama’s actions. Republicans, having backed off comprehensive reform, narrowed their focus to border control and decrying Obama’s executive “overreach.”

Given that history, get ready for a year or more of questions to GOP White House hopefuls about what they would do about all this as president: Revoke permits for undocumented young people—the “dreamers”—who already have temporary legal status under a 2012 Obama policy? Roll back the executive actions now being challenged in court, even if they eventually take effect and millions receive temporary residency permits? Would orders and actions be reversed on Day One? Day 100? The day Congress passes comprehensive reform? And what day might that be? As a famous New Yorker cartoon caption once put it, “How about never—is never good for you?”

And that’s just immigration. The GOP is also out of step with Hispanics on major Obama initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act and re-establishing relations with Cuba, as well as broader questions about the role of government. The chasms will put identity politics—as well as campaign skills, personal connections and policy creativity—to a stiff test.

Mitt Romney failed the test in 2012. He received a paltry 27 percent of the Hispanic vote that year. Pollster Nicole McCleskey published a series of seminal memos on Republicans and Hispanic voters the following year. She concluded that they were largely talking past each other on values and economic issues, and using unhelpful language that obscured common goals on immigration, among them an easier residency process, learning the language and no shortcuts to citizenship.

Education—an issue McCleskey then called “the great equalizer”—today remains a potential point of connection for Republicans and Hispanics. “Latinos are open-minded to conservatives on education. They are open to any approach because their schools are not good,” Barreto says. But citizenship and other shared immigration goals have receded and new wedges have emerged, raising the question of whether even a Bush or a Rubio can repair relations.

Republican strategist Whit Ayres, a Rubio adviser, says the 2016 nominee will need to best Romney by 15 to 20 percentage points among Hispanics in order to win. In his new book, “2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America,” he writes that Romney’s performance with Hispanic voters was the worst of any GOP presidential candidate in a two-person race since Watergate. He also says it was utterly predictable and tries to send his party a wakeup call: “The idea that Republicans can rip into illegal immigrants without antagonizing Hispanic voters is delusional.”

That sums up why Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, though his father was born in Cuba, doesn’t qualify as a party-expander. He’s a ferocious critic of a path to citizenship and Obama’s executive actions and he opposed Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general because she supported “the president’s illegal and unconstitutional executive amnesty.” He likes to joke that the IRS should be padlocked and its nearly 90,000 employees sent to the Southern border to scare off illegal immigrants. When Cruz entered the race, the DREAM Action Coalition, which represents undocumented young people, predicted that “he may be the most anti-immigration candidate on stage” during GOP primary debates.

Cruz is, however, tapping into prevailing GOP sentiment (one recent poll showed Republicans oppose a path to citizenship 3-to-1). Bush and Rubio will need to come across tough enough to win conservative primary votes but empathetic enough to attract Hispanics and moderates in a general election. Rubio got a head start on the first phase by retreating from the bipartisan Senate bill that he had co-sponsored and helped write. Bush often declares he won’t change his stands to meet the moment. Though he has been open to a path to citizenship in the past, he is currently focusing on “earned legal status” for some 11 million undocumented workers. They should work, pay a fine and eventually “come out of the shadows,” he told the Hispanic Christian leaders in Houston.

Another candidate in the GOP’s top tier, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, supported comprehensive reform with a path to citizenship in 2006 and again endorsed that idea in 2013. But he is evolving rapidly. He now says that “if someone wants to be a citizen, they have to go back to their country of origin and get in line behind everybody else who’s waiting.” He even says there may be a need to cut back on legal immigration.

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As the field moves rightward, the lessons of 2012 are stark. Romney talked of self-deportation and, pinned down on whether he would reverse Obama’s 2012 action giving temporary legal status to young people brought to America as children, he said he would let current permits expire and would not approve new ones.

“That translated into he would deport the dreamers,” Barreto says. He contends candidates this time risk similar damage if they take a hard line even on the 2014 Obama actions tied up in court. “If they position themselves as wanting to cancel those policies for whatever reason, the implication is they want those people to be eligible for deportation,” he says. Polling makes clear why that is a problem. For instance, six in 10 Hispanics in a new Latino Decisions-Robert Wood Johnson Foundation poll said they know someone who is undocumented, and 36 percent said they know someone who has faced detention or deportation.

Republicans who want to preserve their options with Hispanics should propose their own ideas and try not to talk about Obama’s executive policies, Nuno advises. “You can avoid some of the details and just say we want to solve this and we think that this will create a more open pathway to legalization,” he says. A Republican strategist familiar with Hispanic candidates and voters, calling these “treacherous waters,” recommends that candidates “make assurances and provide solutions.” Avoid saying Obama’s policies will be repealed on day one, the strategist suggests. And make sure to say you are not going to deport millions of people.

Threading this needle is not easy. Bush gave a crisp “ Yes I would” when Michael Medved asked last week if he’d roll back Obama’s temporary protections for illegal immigrants. He went on to say a new bipartisan law to fix the broken system is “the better answer.” Rubio was more circumspect recently on Univision when he said of existing protection for dreamers, “At some point it’s going to have to end. That is, it cannot continue to be the permanent policy of the United States.” He said he hopes the program ends because Congress passes reforms that make it unnecessary. He also said, however, that piecemeal reforms are the only practical path forward and the first steps have to be border security, a verification system for employers and a tracking system to make sure people don’t overstay their visas.

Nuno, a registered Republican who has grown critical of his party, says Rubio is trying to find a solution but he’s “limited by the dynamics of the people who give money to Republicans.” He points to progressive immigration policy in Utah, a conservative, heavily white state, as evidence of what is “doable” under certain conditions: “Republicans just have to resist the urge to draw white votes in by using Latinos as a punching bag. It’s really tempting when you have that mechanism as a white Republican. It’s hard to resist.”

If Republicans could finally break the immigration logjam, they would still have to deal with conflicting views on other issues. Take the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which virtually every Republican in Congress has vowed to repeal. Gallup reported in March that the uninsured rate among Latinos had dropped 8.3 points since the ACA marketplaces opened at the end of 2013—the most of any ethnic or racial group. A new Latino Decisions-Robert Wood Johnson poll showed an even steeper 11-point decline since spring 2013.

Not surprisingly, Hispanics generally support the law. A new national poll of Hispanics by Florida Atlantic University found that 60 percent view the ACA favorably and 45.2 percent would vote for a presidential candidate who supports it (compared with 31.8 percent who would support an ACA opponent). In addition, reflecting a bent toward a larger government role than most Republicans prefer, by 54 percent to 34 percent Hispanics said the federal government should be responsible for providing coverage.

Ayres has flat-out asserted that the Republican nominee, whoever it is, will have a replacement for Obamacare. “Only 18 percent of Americans want to go back to the system we had before,” he said at a Christian Science monitor breakfast this spring. “Smart Republicans in this area get that. What you’re going to see is a well-crafted Republican alternative that will take some of those aspects of Obamacare but will ameliorate some of the more negative aspects of it,” such as the requirement to buy insurance.

That will be challenging, but still easier than aligning GOP and Hispanic views on Cuba. A majority of Hispanics in a recent MSNBC/Telemundo/Marist poll supported Obama’s moves to thaw relations with Cuba; in another poll, by Bendixen & Amandi International, most Cuban-Americans did as well, particularly the younger ones. Bush and Rubio—consistent with the hard line that until recently has dominated Florida’s Cuban-American politics—have led the drumbeat of Republican denunciations.

For all of these reasons, says Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat and president of the center left think tank NDN, which studies Latino issues, it will be extremely difficult for any Republican to claw back Hispanic votes. That said, he predicts that Bush will be formidable and any ticket will include him or Rubio in the first or second slot. “Bush and Rubio are the best they have. Because of the map and the deficit with Hispanics, it’s almost inconceivable that one of them won’t be on the ticket,” Rosenberg says. His bet is Bush-Walker.

Another alternative is Walker-Rubio. Rubio’s national favorability rating among Latinos was a net negative in a Latino Decisions poll late last year and the firm found “no evidence that Rubio’s candidacy will draw significant Latino support” for him or his party generally. However, that may well change as Rubio raises his profile. As a presidential or vice presidential nominee, he would certainly signal that the GOP is serious about becoming more inclusive. “You have to bring down the barrier somehow,” says the Republican strategist. “The most obvious way to do that is through some personal connection. Both Bush and Rubio have that in equal measure.”

That may not be enough, but as Republicans seek to reconnect with Hispanics, it would be a start.