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They are young, middle-aged and approaching senior status. They are brown and white, male and female.

They are the , and they want your vote.

With just six work days before the July 20 candidate filing deadline, the party held a photo op Monday at the in Pearl City.

The event was billed as “exemplifying unity,” and that it did. The party is betting some of its candidates will defeat their Democratic opponents, perhaps by channeling anger over issues like and education.

Maybe they will. But sure numerical superiority and the advantage of incumbency suggests it will be difficult.

Barring major scandal, a political tsunami or bubonic plague, the is likely to firmly retain its overwhelming .

For one thing, Democrats have history on their side, dominating elected office at nearly every level since before statehood. The state Legislature has not seen a Republican-controlled House or Senate .

For another, the Tea Party anger and throw-the-bums-out mentality seen across the mainland have not resonated in Hawaii with anywhere near the intensity.

Undeterred, the local GOP thanks it has got a chance to upset the mango cart.

“These are not the typical kinds of politicians you see in an election year,” said party chairman Jonah Kaauwai, pointing to the more than a dozen candidates who turned out Monday. “These people come from our communities, they are hard-working, they have put their lives aside to run for office.”

Lynn Finnegann, the party’s vice chair for candidate improvement, said, “This is only a small fraction of the amount (of people) we have spread out across Hawaii. We are looking for energy…We will work 110 percent to fight to give for the people of Hawaii good, balanced government, lower taxes and strong family values.”

Civil Unions an Issue

Keep an eye on family values — namely, civil unions — as a likely campaign issue this fall. The party opposes civil unions. Most Republican legislators voted against , and the Republican governor vetoed it.

“She did vote on HB 444,” Judy Franklin said of Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland, whom she seeks to defeat in state District 13. “I would have opposed that.”

Franklin, a grandmother, researcher and educator, raised other issues, too, all of them familiar to mainland Republicans.

“We need real jobs, not government programs,” she said, “I believe people are tired of runaway taxes and hyper-spending. I am pro-life, pro-traditonal marriage, Christian, a fiscal conservative.”

A similar pitch came from John Willoughby, a Navy veteran challenging Rep. in the .

“We need to relieve the tax burden on Hawaii’s families and small businesses,” he said. “Reckless government spending needs to be stopped, for crying out loud — look around. If you like things the way they are now, keep voting for the guys in the shiny cars in front of the parade. They sold us down the river for a few pieces of silver.”

Political Newbies

Most of the candidates introduced Monday are running for the first time, or have run before and lost. And most are running for the state Legislature, where many races are with only a few thousand votes.

The more hands you shake and the more signs you hang, the better your chance at swaying voters, the theory goes.

So hungry was the GOP for candidates that Kaauwai took to running radio and Internet ads. He says his party now has candidates for all but eight legislative races — “eight pukas,” as he put it — and there are still six working days before Tuesday afternoon’s deadline.

With the exception of Finnegan, the House minority leader and the favored candidate in the lieutenant governor primary (she faces two other Republicans), there were no superstars at Monday’s press conference. The Republican governor and lieutenant governor were not in attendance, as they have been in past candidate unveilings, and the party’s only real rising star — Rep. — was doing the people’s business in D.C.

How Races Are Shaping Up

The elections office won’t have updated candidate filing information until Friday, so the Republicans who registered Monday won’t show up until then.

As of the , however, Democratic candidates for the state House and Senate had a nearly 2-to-1 margin over Republicans — or 102-59.

At that time, at least 12 Democratic incumbents faced neither a primary nor a general election challenger. (The same goes for three Republicans — Reps. , Barbara Marumoto and Cynthia Thielen — showing that incumbency helps regardless of party.)

And, unity aside, at least one candidate, Michael Hale, pulled papers as both a Republican and an independent before siding with the GOP in his race against Sen. Russell Kokubun, the Democrat from the Big Island.

Even if the GOP manages to contest most races, it would take a major upset to change the balance of power. Democrats control the state House by 45-6 seats and the state Senate by 23-2.

Republican presence at the state Capitol has actually declined under Republican Gov. , and two of the party’s most popular faces — Finnegan and Senate Minority Leader Fred Hemmings — won’t be back in 2011.

Going Into Enemy Territory

The dominance of Democrats is clear: House Republicans saw all of their caucus bills defeated in the 2010 session, while Senate Republicans could count on one hand the number of measures they pushed into law. Lingle, meanwhile, has seen the majority of her vetoes easily overridden during her two terms.

To pick up seats, Republicans this year feel they must take Democrats on in their own backyard. They chose the State Elections Office in Pearl City for their announcement, a neighborhood where fences on busy street corners are plastered with the names of veteran Democrats running for office.

“Pearl City was represented by in his first race, and my opponent (Rep. Roy Takumi) has been in office since 1992,” said candidate Reed Shiraki, a chiropractor running for the District 36 seat. “People say it’s political suicide to run, but I’m doing it for two reasons — Republican values align close to my own values, and we need a better balance in the state House.”

Rep. Mark Takai, a Democrat representing District 34, which also includes parts of Pearl City, just happened to walk up to the elections office as Republicans gathered Monday.

“They’re working hard,” he said, impressed with the turnout.

As of Monday, Takai was still unopposed for re-election.