As the son of Cuban immigrants, Marco Rubio is one of the most prominent Hispanics in the United States and could receive the Latino community's support for his 2016 White House bid. But in reality, the bilingual Florida senator's ability to woo that key demographic may not at all be a given, USA Today's Ledyard King observed.

Experts dismiss the Rubio campaign's claim that the 44-year-old Florida Senator would be able to capture more than 40 percent of the Latino electorate in the general election as "increasingly unattainable," the newspaper noted. That is because his party has long alienated such voters, primarily because of its positions on immigration and undocumented migrants in the United States.

The GOP's outlook has been made even worse by the comments of its current presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, who kicked off his campaign last June by describing Mexican immigrants as "criminals," "drug dealers," "rapists" and urging the neighboring country to pay for a wall along its border with the U.S.

"Whoever the (Republican) nominee is, the Democrats can say this person is Trump-approved and they can use all that language to hang around the nominee's neck," said Sylvia Manzano, a former assistant political science professor at Texas A&M University who has studied Latino voting patterns.

Still, some within the GOP still hope that Rubio could turn their party's image around and thus mark a landmark shift similar to that experienced by Democrats when they made then-Sen. Barack Obama their presidential nominee in 2008, the Dallas Morning News' Carl Leubsdorf argued.

"For some time, Rubio has shown the potential to become the Republican Hispanic Obama, a historic figure who could reverse recent GOP setbacks with Latinos," Leubsdorf wrote. But that route comes with its own challenges, the newspaper's former Washington bureau chief admitted.

"Questions remain about whether his Cuban background will appeal to the predominantly Mexican Hispanics in key Western states and whether his youth and personal political skills can surmount his very conservative positions on women's issues, immigration and foreign policy," Leubsdorf explained.