Jeb Bush Hispanic Outreach: Latino Vote In Nevada Targeted With Creation Of New Panel

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush is aiming to garner support from Nevada's Latino voters. It was announced Monday that his campaign had created a 26-member Nevada Hispanic Leadership Committee tasked with delivering his message to the state's Hispanic voters, according to the Associated Press.

Nevada businesswoman Maria Davis and Las Vegas Latin Chamber of Commerce board member Peter Guzman will co-chair the committee. Guzman told the AP in a statement that he felt Bush would help defend American values and bring financial success to the Latino community. Nevada is 27.8 percent Hispanic, about 10 percentage points higher than the national average, according to census data.

Bush has regularly pushed for the Hispanic vote. Early last week he delivered a speech to U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce's annual convention in Houston that was interrupted by protesters. The former governor of Florida began his talk by praising three female Hispanic entrepreneurs, commenting on their drive to succeed.

"Nothing else matters. Not race or ethnicity, not gender, nothing else should. I, for one, am kind of tired about how we figure out ways to break ourselves up in our disparate parts," Bush said, according to Politico. As he concluded his sentence, a group began yelling out, "no hope without our vote," referencing the idea that a GOP candidate cannot win a presidential election without Hispanic support, Politico reported.

Immigration has taken center stage as an issue among Republican candidates hoping to land the nomination in 2016. Outspoken billionaire and front-runner Donald Trump in particular has touted his idea to build a large wall and to immediately deport undocumented immigrants, saying in a 60 Minutes interview: "We're rounding them up in a very humane way, in a very nice way,” as reported by the New York Daily News.

Bush, on the other hand, has pushed for a plan for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status. Bush' wife, Columba, is Mexican-American, and their family is bilingual. Columba Bush recently penned an opinion piece praising her "multicultural family" for Fox News Latino, an idea that her husband had addressed the week before, seemingly with an opposite stance. He described multiculturalism as "the wrong approach" at an event Iowa, according to CNN.

The Nevada committee is the latest attempt to increase support in Nevada, one of the early states in the nomination process. Bush previously announced campaign chairmen in all of the state's counties, the AP reported.