Not so surprisingly, Republican 2016 front-runner Donald Trump's disparaging of Latino immigrants as "rapists" who are "bringing drugs" and "bringing crime" – along with his many other insults and inflammatory actions toward that particular group of people – have led to what's been dubbed the "Trump effect."

As U.S. News' Gabrielle Levy detailed here, "While [Trump's] hardline stance is a key factor in his surprising popularity, the 'Trump effect' – a spike in new voter registration among Latinos upset by his rhetoric – could lead to his and other anti-immigrant candidates' ultimate defeat." Activists say that nationalization of Latino immigrants is on its way up, as one said, "specifically because they want to vote against Trump."

This, of course, has been a concern for the Republican establishment from the beginning of The Donald's bizarre, bombastic presidential campaign, which he's largely built on stoking anxiety about immigrants, refugees and other various others of whom you should be terrified. Remember, emerging from the ashes of their 2012 shellacking at the hands of President Barack Obama, the GOP's brain trust said that better outreach and policy toward the immigrant community was integral to victory going forward.

Well, so much for that.

Trump not only went and ruined the GOP's best laid plans, but the rest of the Republican field – including former immigration reform golden boy Marco Rubio – piled on right after him. Right now in Iowa, the candidates, and even stalwarts of the GOP establishment, are all battering each other over who is most in favor of "amnesty" before Monday's caucuses.

But in another quirk of this wacky 2016 election, the candidate who should be most well-positioned to capitalize on the GOP's madness is, at this point, little more than a footnote in the campaign: former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley.

O'Malley has had the unfortunate luck of running as a perfectly traditional presidential candidate – big city mayor, two-term governor – in a thoroughly non-traditional year. His Maryland passed a lot of progressive legislation and came away with good results, usually a key way to impress primary voters. But Sen. Bernie Sanders ruined his attempt to run to the left of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while his complicated criminal justice record from his Baltimore days became a millstone that it likely wouldn't have been in previous elections. And so he's languished in the single digits since the launch of his campaign.

On immigration specifically, though, O'Malley has a great story to tell. As governor, he implemented a Dream Act, providing in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants at public universities, and made it easier for the undocumented to obtain drivers licenses. He was the first candidate to release a comprehensive immigration reform plan during the campaign, and he picked a fight in 2014 with the Obama administration over its shoddy treatment of Central American refugees.

In fact, El Latino, an Iowa Spanish-language newspaper, endorsed O'Malley, calling him "the most pro-Latino and pro-immigrant candidate in the history of this country."

NOTICIA DE ÚLTIMA HORA: Periódico 'El Latino' de Iowa endorsa a @MartinOMalley para Presidente de EE.UU. pic.twitter.com/wF7L43MpKk — Latinos For O'Malley (@Latinos4OMalley) January 23, 2016

It probably won't make a huge difference in terms of his national numbers, but it certainly doesn't help O'Malley that the first two states in which votes are actually cast are overwhelmingly white. (That's just one of many reasons why the current way America holds its primaries needs to go.) Though the Latino population has more than doubled in Iowa over the last 15 years, the highest number of Latinos to have ever caucused there is 3,500, back in 2008. That's not much for a candidate to bank upon.

Still, as historian Aaron Sanchez wrote recently, "The O’Malley campaign seems to be the only campaign that has built Latinos, Latino issues, and Latino messaging into the foundational structures of its campaign." But the first primary state with a healthy Latino presence is Nevada, on Feb. 20, two very long weeks after New Hampshire. Even there, former Secretary of State Clinton is already dominant in the polls, and a Sanders win in either Iowa or New Hampshire (or both!) will give him momentum and the press narrative going into that contest. By that point, it might already be too late for O'Malley, if it isn't already.

Not that all Latinos or immigrants vote only on immigration reform, or that the records of Sanders or Clinton on the issue are bad. In fact, it might actually be Trump's carnival-barking that hurts O'Malley too; Trump has a hideous approval rating among Latinos, and presumably any qualm they have with any of the Democrats would be forgiven when facing the prospect of Trump winning the Oval Office.