The Republican National Committee announced a major expansion of its Hispanic outreach program: the addition of Hispanic outreach state directors in six battleground states.

"We all know the importance of reaching out to the Latino community," Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus said Monday during a conference call. "Latinos are clamoring for change, and the Republican Party is here to offer them the change they're looking for."

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The party will for the first time put Hispanic state directors in swing states to target the Latino communities. The targets: the heavily Latino states of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Florida, as well as North Carolina and Virginia, two states with rapidly growing Hispanic populations.

The efforts will consist of state-specific messaging, get-out-the-vote and voter registration drives.



Mitt Romney and the GOP are suffering from a major gap in the polls with Hispanic voters, who are the fastest-growing part of the electorate. Romney said at a private fundraiser this weekend that those poll numbers "spell doom for us" and needed to be improved.



Priebus admitted that the GOP couldn't win without improving those numbers, and said they'd do it by arguing Obama "can't be trusted" to follow through on campaign promises ranging from immigration reform to the DREAM Act to the economy.

"Latinos have been bearing the brunt of the Obama economy," said Priebus, who also described Obama's efforts on the DREAM Act and immigration reform as a "goose egg."

RNC Hispanic Outreach Director Bettina Inclan said that the messages would be tailored and targeted for the individual Hispanic communities in the states but that the overall message would be the same across the country and in both English and Spanish.

"The biggest mistake people do is have one message in English and one message in Spanish," she said. "It will be reflective of the distances in these different communities and that's why we have people on the ground, but it's going to be one unified message."

