Jeb Bush was preaching to the choir, but the message was meant to resonate far beyond the stately Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

``It would be incredibly stupid over the long haul to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote,'' the former Florida governor told a packed audience Friday at the Hispanic Leadership Network's inaugural conference.

It's stupid, Bush reiterated, and named names. As in: New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Texas -- key swing states with large and growing Hispanic populations that can make or break any presidential candidate.

Former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferré, a moderate, pro-business Democrat, wasn't at the conference. But he has a similar take, coming from a different direction. He points to the 2010 election as a wake-up call for Hispanic voters who stayed home because Democrats didn't inspire and many Republicans won with an ``us-versus-them'' script.

Miami's Marco Rubio became a U.S. senator with a conservative message, but he didn't energize non-Cuban Hispanics in Central Florida, where Puerto Ricans, many of them independents who embraced Bush and his brother George W., are the Hispanic majority.

Republican Brian Sandoval won the governorship of Nevada without the Hispanic vote. In New Mexico, Susana Martinez became the new GOP governor with only 30 percent of Latino support, Ferré notes, because ``she is soft on immigration reform and hard on border control.''

It's not that immigration is the top issue for most Hispanics. The top issues for Hispanics are the same issues all Americans are concerned about: jobs, housing, healthcare. Those trump immigration on most people's lists -- unless they feel they are being scape-goated, bad-mouthed, disrespected.

And that's exactly how most Latinos felt in the 2010 elections in California, Arizona and Nevada, and why polls keep showing two-thirds of Hispanics nationally lean Democratic.

The fringe right of the GOP, by bad-mouthing ``illegals'' as if they are all drug-running thugs, have raised the stakes. The U.S. Senate, with a filibuster threat, would not even allow a common-sense bill like the Dream Act to become law to legalize the status of young adults who arrived as kids, even though a majority of senators and most Americans support it.

Bush says there are ``four simple things'' that the Republican Party's leadership can do to change that failing formula: strike the right tone, as in civility; embrace a broad agenda; appoint a diverse group of qualified people to key jobs, and recruit Hispanic candidates.

``We share many common values,'' Bush said, ``but if you turn it into `them and us' that won't help the GOP.'' He noted his party has ``the responsibility of civility to draw to our cause.''

Even W. got in the act -- by video. He told the conference that Hispanics share the conservative themes of entrepreneurship, service, faith and family and the belief that ``all life is precious.''

Former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the winning strategy is ``center-right, a moderate right. That's what makes things work. People don't like extremes.''

At the opening event, no one mentioned the tea party or that GOP legislators had just spent days in Tallahassee discussing offensive Arizona-style tactics to harass people who talk with an accent or ``look'' Hispanic.

But later at an immigration panel, former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart offered common-sense advice: ``Respect has to be the No. 1 priority.''