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.
“This is plainly a moment in American politics in which the extraordinary can happen,” he added.
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Schoenfeld claims that a general election contest between presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic opponent, sets the perfect stage for an independent candidate to not only enter the White House race, but to win it.
Trump’s temperament, lack of substantive policy proposals and refusal to release his tax returns, combined with the media’s heightened scrutiny in a general election, creates a climate in which a third-party candidate could clinch the presidency, Schoenfeld suggested.
“In 2012, mild, moderate, respectable, sane Mitt Romney got a taste of what it means to be under the journalistic knife in a general election,” he wrote, claiming that the “liberal press is now going to cut out Trump’s liver, fry it up and eat it out of a taco bowl.”
“Trump has already endured countless shipwrecks only to emerge stronger. But the rules of the game in the general election differ radically from the primaries, and the stakes are immeasurably higher,” Schoenfeld added.
He continued, “If a credible conservative independent candidate is in the race, he or she will be there to rescue the Republican party from its folly and rescue the country from a brush with the least qualified and most temperamentally unfit major-party candidate in all of U.S. history.”
Schoenfeld’s op-ed was published just hours after Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol told CNN there is a “50-50” chance he and a handful of prominent conservatives will be able to find and put forward an alternative candidate to Trump and Clinton.
Kristol met with Romney last week in an attempt to draft him as that alternative option, but declined to tell CNN during an interview on Monday how the former Massachusetts governor responded.
In his column, Schoenfeld identified Romney and Republican Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Marco Rubio of Florida as the most viable options for conservatives hoping to draft a third-party candidate.
