The leader of the national Republican Party rallied supporters in Colorado on Wednesday and said that the GOP’s efforts to “be a national party that’s everywhere, all the time, in every community around the country” are paying off.

“You are all at the epicenter of not just having a great midterm but of laying the groundwork of saving this country and putting a Republican in the White House in 2016,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus told a standing-room-only crowd of several hundred gathered at state party headquarters in Greenwood Village. “And it happens right here.”

That groundwork includes year-round engagement with communities that have swung toward Democrats in recent elections, Priebus said after meeting with several dozen Hispanic leaders later that afternoon at a Mexican restaurant in Aurora.

The key to increasing support among Hispanics and other communities is simply showing up — not just a few months before an election, but by organizing and talking to voters day in and day out, “every time, across this country without stopping,” Priebus told reporters at a press conference held at Ajuuaa!! (the restaurant’s name officially includes two exclamation points), surrounded by candidates and the three members of the Legislature’s Republican Hispanic caucus.

“It may sound reasonable and normal to most people, but reasonable and normal wasn’t what was happening,” Priebus said.

Pointing to Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob Beauprez and his running mate Jill Repella, Senate candidate Cory Gardner and U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman — who delivered his remarks in Spanish — Priebus said that the inroads the party is making among Colorado’s Hispanic voters should spell victory in November.

The GOP’s work, he said, will lead to “taking what is rightfully ours — (Colorado) is a purple state that should be red under the right circumstances, but for the right reasons — for better jobs, a clean environment, getting our economy back on track.”

A beaming Beauprez made a case for the Hispanic vote, contending that Republican principles better reflect the community’s values.

“The Democrat Party, while it says it’s for the little guy, where’s the jobs in your community? How are the schools in your community performing? Where’s that opportunity they promised to deliver? What they delivered is more regulation, more government on you rather than more freedom for you,” Beauprez said. “We’re going to get government out of the way. And, if it’s government that’s the problem, we’re going to grab it by the root and rip it out of the ground and throw it in the fire and get rid of it.”

At the rally at the state GOP offices, State Treasurer Walker Stapleton made a similar pitch, urging Republicans to keep their eye on the ball and not to get “distracted” by issues favored by Democrats.

Stapleton said that his work last year fighting Amendment 66 — a proposed billion-dollar tax increase to fund education, roundly rejected by state voters — made it clear that Colorado is an economically conservative state.

What matters to voters, he said, is how to pay for Medicaid expansion, how to pay for an under-funded public retirement system, and whether the state is going to allow excessive regulation to curb the energy industry.

“Don’t be distracted, don’t be diverted,” Stapleton said to cheers. “Let’s win in November! Let’s focus on the issues that matter to our families, the economic issues.”

It wasn’t long ago that a Republican presidential candidate won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, said RNC deputy political director Jennifer Sevilla Korn, who directs the GOP’s national Hispanic initiatives. “We know what it takes to be successful.”

After enduring a trouncing from Hispanic voters in the last presidential election — according to exit polling, Republican nominee Mitt Romney took just 27 percent of Latino voters nationwide in 2012, a precipitous drop from the 44 percent won by President George W. Bush in 2004 — the national GOP released a scorching “autopsy” that called for, among other fixes, better outreach in the Hispanic and other communities.

The GOP’s 2013 Growth and Opportunity Project report also called for comprehensive immigration reform, though House Republicans have opposed taking up a broad, bipartisan Senate bill passed more than a year ago.

Priebus told reporters that the party’s internal disagreements over immigration policy won’t thwart efforts to make inroads among Hispanic voters.

“A secure border is paramount and fundamental to any plan that comes across the House or the Senate,” he said, noting that recent news of young immigrants pouring across the border underscores the importance of solving that problem.

Democrats were having none of it, charging that merely showing up isn’t enough if Republican policies leave Hispanic voters cold.

“While we welcome the Republican’s leader to Colorado, we call on him to back up his words with actions,” state Democratic Party chairman Rick Palacio told The Colorado Statesman.

“Following the 2012 election, the GOP undertook a postmortem, in which Chairman Priebus said ‘among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, must be to embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,’ yet in the two years Republicans have had to take responsible action to pass comprehensive immigration reform, they’ve not only failed to act, but Republicans like Cory Gardner and Mike Coffman have voted to deport DREAMers and failed to even bring immigration reform up for a vote,” Palacio said.

Priebus said that he’s concerned with how the party operates, not so much with particular policy questions.

Republicans have to get away from the notion that the national GOP “exists for the purpose of a bank account for the presidential nominee,” he maintained.

“The national party has to be competent in places that, while sometimes boring to talk about — ground game, engagement, data, infrastructure, making sure you don’t have 23 debates and a traveling circus, you don’t have six months of slicing and dicing in your primary — that, while this stuff seems boring, that being a party obsessed with the mechanics of engagement in the Hispanic community is a major shift in philosophy that really is the focus of what the Growth and Opportunity Party is all about. What we’re seeing in this restaurant and outside of this restaurant is the culmination of that project here in Colorado,” Priebus said.

Maintaining a long-term presence in communities over the long haul, Priebus continued, means the ability to point out differences between Republican and Democratic candidates — such as which party favors school choice, which party wants to make more small business loans available.

“But if you’re not there as a party, and if you’re not in a community for a long period of time, who’s there? The other side is there, and you never make your pitch. You can craft policies all day long up here, but if I don’t have a conduit in the community telling people what we believe in,” Priebus said, “then the numbers aren’t going to move, either.”

See the Sept. 26 print edition for full photo coverage.

— Ernest@coloradostatesman.com