President Obama and Mitt Romney are set to make appearances beginning Thursday at a major gathering of Latino officials and activists in Florida, a moment that campaign-weary Democrats have awaited for weeks.

Obama's strategists relish any chance to drive a wedge between Romney and Hispanic voters, and at the annual conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO, the president is all-but-certain to paint Romney as beholden to anti-immigrant elements of his party's conservative base.

It's an article of faith inside the Obama campaign's Chicago headquarters that the country's shifting demographics -- particularly growing Hispanic communities that lean Democratic in several swing states -- might be enough to put the election out of reach for Romney, no matter how sluggish the economy is.

Few locales will test that theory in November better than the host city for the NALEO conference: Orlando, ground zero for Florida's rapidly expanding Latino population.

"The combination of demographics and the issue narrative in Orlando could be the difference between 29 electoral votes or not," said Steve Schale, who managed Obama's winning 2008 campaign in Florida. "It's one of the areas where President Obama could grow from 2008."

Until Obama's victory, Orange County, home to Orlando and Disney World, had developed a well-earned reputation as one of Florida's premier battlegrounds.

The county was decided by fewer than 6,000 votes in every presidential election going back to 1996.

That all changed in 2008, when Obama carried the county by 85,000 votes against John McCain.

In April, Schale, who maintains a blog devoted to Sunshine State political math that's closely followed by operatives in both parties, began combing through Census data and voter registration numbers in an effort to gauge whether Obama's Orlando blowout in 2008 was an aberration or the new normal in Florida campaigns.

His findings, outlined in a post titled "Orlando Rising," underscore the Obama campaign's demographics-as-destiny argument.

Defining the Orlando metro area as Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties, Shale mapped out several unmistakably positive trends for Democrats:

• The Orlando area's population jumped by 436,000 people between 2000 and 2010, from 1.4 million residents to 1.85 million. African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, who tend to vote Democratic, accounted for more than half of that growth.

• Between October 2006 and January 2012, the region added about 84,000 new voters and three quarters of those were African-American or Hispanic. The vast majority of new voters registered as Democrats. Over the same period, the share of the white vote in Orlando increased by only 7 percent.

• In 1994, Republicans accounted for 50 percent of registered voters in the three sprawling counties surrounding Orlando. That number has now dropped to 33 percent. At the same time, 41 percent of Orlando voters are now Democrats, with the remainder not registering in either party.

Similar population changes are happening across Florida.

"The Democrats' lead among Hispanic voters has grown just in the last four years," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center.

Latinos now comprise 13 percent of the Florida electorate, up from 11 percent in 2008. More Latinos are now registered as Democrats than as Republicans, a reversal from previous election cycles.

At first glance, those shifts may seem modest. But in a huge state where the race may come down to a few thousand votes, any mathematical edge matters greatly.

The fluid nature of the state's electorate is driven in large part by an influx of Puerto Ricans -- who are eligible vote the moment they arrive because of Puerto Rico's status as a U.S. territory -- along with growing Dominican, Colombian, Mexican and Venezuelan populations.

Puerto Ricans are now the second largest Hispanic group in the state after Cuban-Americans, a Republican-leaning bloc that has seen its share of the statewide vote decline as other Latino communities grow at a faster clip.

Strategists in both parties say Florida's decade-long Hispanic boom is most visible around Orlando, now the second-largest hub of Puerto Ricans in the country outside of New York.

Neighborhoods like Kissimmee, Buenaventura Lakes and Meadow Woods, which hugs Orlando International Airport, have become hot spots for Obama campaign organizers.

Among Florida's largest counties, Orange County's Hispanic population grew by 83 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

That's faster than in Miami-Dade, Broward or Palm Beach County --- three huge and reliably Democratic counties in south Florida.

Courting the Puerto Rican vote in Orlando is now an essential part of any Florida campaign itinerary, as vital as throwing back a shot of sugar-packed coffee in front of reporters at Versailles Restaurant in Miami's Little Havana.