In the summer of 1996, I was at the NAACP's national convention in Charlotte, N.C., talking to my old boss Kweisi Mfume, then president of the NAACP, when a staff member interrupted to tell Mfume, "Sen. Dole's not coming."

In presidential election years, the NAACP traditionally invites the nominees of the two major parties to address the annual convention. The Dole campaign's decision not to attend visibly surprised and disappointed Mfume.

I was surprised myself. The nominee of the party of Lincoln is not even going to talk to the country's oldest civil rights group? That struck me as crazy. I started drafting Bob Dole's speech in my head. You can make a case for almost anything, and Dole could have made a case for the Republican Party — starting with a simple statement of respect, which comes with accepting an invitation, for the NAACP.

Not that Dole was going to take a lot of black votes from Bill Clinton in 1996. But it's important to make the case and compete for votes. When you write off a demographic group, you're basically saying: "We're not going to trouble ourselves over you. We've got nothing for you."

The Republicans' relationship with blacks isn't much better today than it was then. And Republicans now have similar problems with Latinos, the fastest-growing demographic group in the country. Mitt Romney, the Republicans' presumptive nominee this year, has polled at less than 25 percent among Hispanics in a one-on-one matchup with President Barack Obama, and a Univision poll of Hispanics showed that only 17 percent of those polled believe that Republicans are doing a good job reaching out to them. Obviously, immigration policies are an obstacle for Republican efforts to appeal to Hispanics, especially because of the scornful way some Republicans speak on the issue.

If Republicans somehow were able to get some tea party leaders and Hispanic leaders to hammer out some immigration policies acceptable to both, they could expand their party and reduce divisiveness in the country. President George W. Bush tried to get his party to back comprehensive immigration reform, but that effort failed, and certainly no Republican presidential candidate this year appeared at all interested in following his example.

Republicans aren't doing very well with the youth vote, either. Two-thirds of both the youth vote and the Hispanic vote went to Obama in 2008.

So here's the question that has to confront the Republican Party: "We're doing badly with African-Americans, Hispanics and young people. This is a demographic nightmare for us. Shouldn't we modify our policies and — consistent with our philosophy of lower taxes and limited government — try to find policies that can appeal to this expanding pool of voters?"

So far, their answer has been "no."

The party of "government should be run more like a business" is in fact running not at all like a business. A business that doesn't change its products for a changing market is dead.

So how can the Republicans compete if they're not changing their policies? By changing the rules so that people who support them have more power and people who oppose them have less.

In future columns, I will write about the voter suppression laws newly in effect for the 2012 election. They make it harder for minorities and young people to vote. I also will write about the impact of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which, for the first time, has allowed individuals to donate unlimited sums for political campaigns while hiding behind super political action committees and also allows corporate and union officials to make unlimited political contributions with their shareholders' or members' money without their knowledge — all on the premise that independent spending on political speech does not have the potential to corrupt, a notion that Sen. John McCain has called "naive."

But first, a quick look at how the Republican outreach to the NAACP has evolved since Dole turned down the NAACP invitation in 1996.

In Florida, where the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a new voting law in 2011, the president of a county branch of the NAACP registered two voters over this past Martin Luther King holiday weekend. He submitted the registrations to the office of Florida's secretary of state Jan. 17, the first business day after the holiday. Shortly thereafter, he received a warning letter from the secretary of state's office stating that "the applications were untimely under the law" and that "any future violation of the third-party voter registration law may result in my referral of the matter to the attorney general for an enforcement action."

The new Florida law requires registrations to be submitted within 48 hours — even if 24 of those 48 hours occur on a federal holiday. The NAACP registrations came in the 50th hour. Because of the threat of fines, the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote have suspended efforts to register voters in Florida. The NAACP branch president says he's going to keep trying.

Tom Rosshirt was a national security speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a foreign affairs spokesman for Vice President Al Gore. Email him at [email protected]. To find out more about Tom Rosshirt and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.