The California Republican Party has never been less relevant. It has no statewide elected officials. It’s a super-minority in the Legislature. Only 1 in 4 registered voters belongs to it. And the state’s entire GOP House delegation can fit in a minivan.

Yet the three people vying to be state party chair this weekend at the GOP’s convention in Sacramento aren’t calling for wholesale changes. Far from it.

They don’t think the party needs a new approach to immigration or climate change, issues where polls say the GOP is out of step with California voters.

Nor should it back away from President Trump — even though 62 percent of likely California voters polled in January said they disapproved of his job performance.

“It’s a great day in America: Donald Trump is president,” would-be party chair Steve Frank said on my “It’s All Political” podcast, repeating the line he uses during his frequent appearances on conservative talk radio shows across the state. Neither of his opponents would disagree.

Absent any policy differences, the main distinction between the candidates is a battle over whether the problem is, in fact, what’s left of the California Republican Party’s establishment.

The 1,400 delegates meeting this weekend will choose between Frank, whose roots in the California Republican Party go back to Ronald Reagan’s first term ... as governor; Travis Allen, who ran for governor last year and thought the Republican opponent backed by Trump, John Cox, was too liberal; and Jessica Millan Patterson, a longtime party operative unknown to the public but the favorite of the GOP’s withered establishment.

On Thursday, Frank and Allen announced that they were joining forces to lead “the resistance” at the convention against Patterson and the party establishment. In the likely event that delegates deadlock Sunday in their first vote for a new party chair — a candidate needs a majority of delegates to win — Frank and Allen have urged their backers to support the other one for party chair on a second ballot against Patterson, who would be the first female chair in California Republican Party history.

For those trying to keep this straight, that’s two conservative Republicans calling themselves the leader of “the resistance” — against their fellow Republicans.

Here’s where the candidates stand on the GOP’s biggest problems, and what to do about them:

Reaching nonwhite voters: Nonwhite Republicans are becoming more rare by the day. Latinos, the state’s single largest ethnic demographic, long ago fled the party. Eighty-six percent surveyed by the group Latino Decisions said after the November midterm elections that they had voted for a Democratic House candidate. Seventy-three percent said Trump had done or said something that made them mad.

Frank, 72, who attended his first state GOP convention in 1966, conceded that “we’ve never opened a conversation with Latino voters.”

Yet none of the candidates embraces a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents. There’s no need, Frank said: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott won 41 percent of the Latino vote in his recent re-election bid “with the exact same values and positions on immigration as the California Republican Party.”

The solution, Frank said, is simple: “Show up at the Hispanic communities. ... Go to the Hispanic Grocers Association. We don’t do the real work that the Texas Republican Party does.”

Allen agreed that Latinos and Republicans are philosophically aligned. His solution is not to try to cater to “identity politics,” as Democrats do, but to win over Latinos and everyone else with Republican values of small government and conservative social positions.

Patterson, who is Latina, said she could open new doors for the state party because “I would be the first person to look like me who would be chairman.”

She said she would expand the party’s work with organizations such as Grow Elect, which has helped 230 Latino Republicans win election to local nonpartisan offices. However, the party’s brand is so toxic that only one Latino Republican sponsored by the group has been elected to partisan office, where candidates have to reveal which party they belong to.

Winning moderate voters: Frank, publisher of the conservative newsletter California Political Review, doesn’t think the party should change to appeal to more moderate voters on issues such as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and climate change. The GOP’s platform, he said, “is based on actual economics and real science — not junk science.”

The party’s real problem in November was that “we didn’t have a statewide message for the voters,” Frank said. “If you don’t have registration, if you don’t have candidates, if you don’t have a message, the debacle of November 2018 was easily predictable.”

Allen, who believes “the verdict is still out” on climate change, agreed that the party should be more conservative instead of “Democrat lite.”

But Patterson said the party needs to talk about issues in a different way while not alienating potential supporters.

“We all care about the environment,” Patterson said. But “it’s not just what you say, but how you say it to people as well.”

Growing the GOP brand: Allen promised to get 100,000 California Republicans to give $10 a month and direct the money into voter registration efforts. Allen said only he could do that because he counts 25,000 people on his list of supporters and donors.

Reality check: In 2018, the state GOP had roughly 37,000 donors who gave $100 or less, according to party officials.

Frank, a longtime social conservative, thinks the party can grow by reaching out to evangelical Christians, most of whom he said are not registered voters.

Allen blasted Patterson for receiving the endorsement of nearly every elected Republican in the state Legislature (many of whom served with Allen in Sacramento), along with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield. Allen said those endorsements and her leadership of California Trailblazers, an organization that trains GOP candidates, are an “example of the failing status quo.”

Former East Bay Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, a moderate who lost her re-election bid in November, told The Chronicle last month that she worried centrist GOP lawmakers would leave the party if Allen became chair. Patterson declined to respond to Allen’s comments because “I don’t talk poorly about my opponents, or any other Republicans for that matter.”

“But,” Patterson said, “I would say that I’d rather have someone like Catharine Baker in office who is voting with Republicans 89 percent of the time than the Democrat that’s there now who will not.”

While the candidates bicker, outgoing party chair Jim Brulte, a longtime state senator, offered simple advice for how Republicans can change the party’s fortunes: Talk to someone other than white Republicans.

“Unless and until Republicans in California get a lot more Hispanic, Asian American and African American votes, we are going to struggle at the ballot box,” Brulte said. “Republicans spend way too much time talking to the choir and not enough time talking to people who can be converted.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli