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.