A former senior adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney claimed Monday that Americans and the media should be careful to dismiss how far a conservative, third-party candidate could go if one emerges in the coming months.

“An ocean of conventional wisdom is telling us that an independent conservative candidate, should one emerge, will go nowhere fast. But a short while ago, an ocean of conventional wisdom was telling us that Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket violated the basic laws of the universe,” Gabriel Schoenfeld, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, wrote in a column Monday afternoon for USA Today.