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The Republican Party launched its latest effort Thursday to sell itself to a more diverse segment of the population, acknowledging a glaring weakness in the GOP's ability to attract new voters in a country whose demographics are rapidly changing.

Some prominent Republicans expressed immediate skepticism at the party's plans to shine a spotlight on its younger, minority up-and-comers. But Republican leaders say they can help broaden the party's appeal by changing the faces of the GOP's primary messengers. At stake is the Republican Party's ability to compete against Democrats in elections for years to come.

"We have this stereotype of Republicans being old, white, Anglo-Saxon men. But there's people like me that have been out there working for years," said 30-year-old New Hampshire state Rep. Marilinda Garcia, one of four people featured in a "Rising Stars" panel at the RNC's summer meeting in Boston. "So they're like, 'Why not have her talk about our values instead of Newt Gingrich all the time?'"

RNC spokesmen have been instructed to promote Republicans like Garcia in media interviews, while other staffers have been hired to live and work in minority communities to pitch Republican values. GOP leaders say it's an unprecedented effort.

Doubts by some leading Republicans underscored the continuing identity crisis for a party still struggling to regroup after a painful 2012 election season.

"This is a baby step," said former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, an African-American. "We're talking 50-plus years of separation between African-Americans and the GOP that has only become progressively worse over the last 10 or so years. ... This stuff will not get done overnight."

"At this point, like many Hispanic conservatives, I have to see it to believe it," said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles and a part of the George W. Bush administration. "I'm familiar with RNC efforts toward the Hispanic community that go back a long time."

Indeed, the GOP's latest push to court minority voters follows similar efforts by Republican leaders dating back at least to the 1980s, when the GOP under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush repeatedly declared black and Hispanic outreach a priority. Some Republicans suggest that things won't change in earnest until the party embraces different policies and abandon's anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Steele cited efforts by Republican legislatures to disenfranchise minority voters by passing strict voter identification laws, while Aguilar and others cited consistent resistance among House Republicans to a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

"You can't just deliver any message," Frank Fahrenkopf, an RNC chairman from 1983 to 1989, said of party policies. "You've got to deliver the right one."

Despite decades of effort, the Republican Party took a step backward in last year's presidential contest among women and minorities. Women voted for President Barack Obama by an 11-point margin in 2012, and they have not backed a GOP candidate for president since Reagan's successful bid for re-election in 1984.

Although last year's nominee, Mitt Romney, improved on John McCain's margin of victory among whites in 2008, Romney fared worse than McCain among Hispanic and Asian voters, who make up a growing share of the U.S. population.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus says the committee has already hired more than 150 staffers across the country to help court new voters.

"What's different this time is you can look at the numbers," he said. "We're doing things that have never been done before in our party."

The newest piece is the RNC's "Rising Stars" program, which debuted with four members:

—Garcia, first elected to the New Hampshire legislature at 23.

—Karin Agness, founder and president of the Network of enlightened Women, or NeW.

—Scott G. Erickson, a San Jose, Calif., police officer for 15 years and a conservative writer.

—T.W. Shannon, an African-American and speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

Four more rising stars were to be added when the committee meets again in four months. The RNC also has created an online database that allows staffers to quickly find fresh faces for media interviews.

Preibus suggested that new faces will matter and downplayed the need for his party to embrace new policies, such as comprehensive immigration reform.

"I'm not disagreeing that it's not an extremely important issue," he said of immigration reform, "It's not the end all, be all, either."

The comments come nine months after he endorsed an RNC report that said otherwise.

"We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform," the internal report found. "If we do not, our party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only."

It’s January 2015, and a newly elected House member from California walks side by side with his male partner to be sworn into office in Washington. The young lawmaker is a supporter of same-sex marriage. He believes the government should keep abortion legal. He considers himself an environmentalist.

He's also a Republican.

This could be the future for one Carl DeMaio, a former San Diego city councilman and recent mayoral candidate who is expected to challenge freshman Democratic Rep. Scott Peters in the state's 52nd congressional district. DeMaio has announced his plan to challenge Peters, but the unfolding sexual harassment scandal surrounding San Diego Mayor Bob Filner could also draw DeMaio into a special election for the mayor's office if Filner is recalled.

DeMaio, 38, doesn’t fit the mold of a traditional Republican. His election could make him the only openly gay GOP member of Congress. (Just two openly gay Republicans have ever served in the House.) DeMaio's views on same-sex marriage and abortion are also at odds with the party platform.

But DeMaio says he’s not interested in making social issues central to his campaign. While open about his beliefs, his run is focused on government accountability and pocketbook-issue reform instead of relitigating the culture wars.

“We ought to take those divisive issues, particularly the social issues, and set them off to the side,” DeMaio told Yahoo News in an interview. “It’s not appropriate for the government to be making decisions for people in their private lives. Instead, we should demand that we look beyond labels to embrace common sense ideas on financial reform and holding these government programs accountable.”

DeMaio's policy views — economically conservative and socially liberal — place him in a libertarian wing of the Republican Party, one that seems to be growing in popularity among young voters. But he's reluctant to put himself in any category.

“I warmly embrace the libertarian label, but I also want to point out that one of my biggest frustrations in politics is that people want to shove one or two big labels on some people that sums who they are and what they believe and what their record has been. I think that’s limiting,” DeMaio said.

Despite his potential of being a maverick if he makes it to Congress, DeMaio is not a fringe candidate. He has early support from the party establishment — the National Republican Congressional Committee, the official party group responsible for electing Republicans to the House, is backing him full force. In July, California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the third-ranking House Republican, hosted a fundraiser for him in Washington. The invitation branded DeMaio as a “New Generation Republican.”

Given his background, DeMaio seems like just the type of candidate that the soul-searching Republican Party is looking for.

“I actually think that we are going to make headway in the Republican Party on these issues in the coming years,” DeMaio told Yahoo News. “It is going to be a totally different thrust for the Republican Party.”

DeMaio was born in Iowa, and his family moved to Southern California when he was a child. DeMaio’s father left the family and his mother died while he was still in high school. Young DeMaio was sent to boarding school at Georgetown Preparatory School near Washington, and he went on to graduate from Georgetown University.

As a young man in the nation’s capital during Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in 1994, DeMaio plugged into the city’s conservative scene, developing his skills as a policy researcher. He took a job with the Congressional Institute, a think tank that hosts conferences for lawmakers on policymaking.

He went on to found his own group, The Performance Institute, which does similar work and emphasizes transparency reforms and efficiency in government. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, DeMaio established himself as a policy wonk, publishing position papers on government reform for various groups, including the libertarian Reason Foundation based in California.

DeMaio won a seat on the San Diego City Council in 2008, where he focused on several city-based reforms, including a successful push to overhaul the costly pension program for city workers by placing new employees into private, 401(k)-style retirement accounts.

He ran a robust campaign for mayor of San Diego in 2012, losing to Democrat Bob Filner by just 3 percentage points despite a surge in Democratic turnout across the state supporting President Barack Obama's re-election.

DeMaio announced his candidacy to challenge Peters in May.

A DeMaio victory would give a boost to Republicans in California, where the party has been steadily losing ground for two decades. There are currently just 15 Republicans among the state's 55-member congressional delegation, the nation's largest.

According to early poll numbers, DeMaio could be a viable challenger. His mayoral campaign provided him with strong name-ID in the district, a crucial leg up for any candidate challenging an incumbent. A Survey USA poll conducted in June, 17 months before next year’s election, showed DeMaio leading Peters in a hypothetical matchup by 11 percentage points.

As with any political campaign, DeMaio has also made enemies. His support of the pension overhaul enraged organized labor interests, and he won few friends within the gay community when he accepted campaign donations from supporters of the movement to ban same-sex marriage in California. Last year, when DeMaio and his partner, Jonathan Hale, walked together in the San Diego LGBT Pride Parade, some in the crowd booed him along the way.

Publicly, national Democrats dismiss DeMaio as a grandstander. But privately, some express concern that he could be a strong challenger to Peters, particularly since there is little daylight between the two candidates on some of the social issues that have tripped up other Republican candidates in previous races around the country. The election will also occur midway through Obama's second term, an election cycle that historically isn't as hospitable to the president's party.

But since DeMaio's former political foe, Filner, is almost sure to face a well-organized recall campaign in the coming weeks, DeMaio is considered a prime candidate to run in a special election to replace him. Filner has conceded behaving inappropriately but is refusing to resign.

DeMaio told Yahoo News that he would “absolutely” sign a petition to recall Filner, but was coy when asked if he would seek the mayor’s office.

“There are benefits and liability in weighing into that question right now,” DeMaio told Yahoo News. “I’m going to continue to focus on how we can rid our city of the cancer that is Bob Filner. Until he departs that office, our city will be held hostage and our people’s business will not get done.”

In San Diego, the accusations against Filner, (which DeMaio warned about during the campaign against him last year), have dominated the news cycle for weeks. Filner on Tuesday challenged the recall in a written statement, but the campaign is likely to begin as early as this month, forcing DeMaio to make what will surely be a difficult choice.