Robert Allen Mansfield, a sergeant in the National Guard with service in Iraq, has announced he is dropping out of the May 18 Republican primary election to run for governor as an independent.
The state Republican committee voted overwhelmingly, last month, to endorse Attorney General Tom Corbett for the spot.
Still in the primary race is state Rep. Sam Rohrer (R-128)
Mansfield is an African-American from Philadelphia, born in 1971, whose heroine addicted mother put him up for adoption. He spent two years in foster care before being adopted by the Mansfield family.
He had a stormy youth in which he ran away from home several times. Things began to turn around in 1991, he says, when he accepted Jesus Christ into his life. He earned his GED and joined the Guard in 1996.
While in the Guard he did odd jobs and began his own financial firm, R. Allen Associates.
He now lives in York.
For the independent run he will require 19,000 signatures rather than the 2,000 he got for the primary.
Here is a link to a biography and his positions.
They include a belief in smaller government, school choice, free markets, and that every child is a gift from God.
“I know that life begins at conception,” he says. “I don’t need to defer to a higher pay grade to come to that conclusion”