Bert Mizusawa

Mizusawa comes from a family of immigrants, attended Virginia public schools and was the first in his family to attend college. He has said that neither of his parents attended college and that his family was relatively poor.⁠[1][2]

Mizusawa graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1979; he has said he finished first in his class of more than 1,400 cadets. He served in the U.S. Army until 2015, rising to major general, and received the Silver Star in 1984.⁠[3][2]

His campaign says he served as an Airborne Ranger in a paratroop battalion in Europe, received the Silver Star for combat leadership in the Korean DMZ during the Cold War, and commanded the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force in Afghanistan. He has said his service included four combat tours.⁠[1][2]

In 2010 Mizusawa ran for Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District seat and received 17.4% of the vote.⁠[3]

In 2016 he was a senior national security adviser to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and served on the first Trump administration’s transition team, advising on defense and national security. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2018 but did not collect enough signatures to appear on the ballot.⁠[3][4]

On January 20, 2026, Mizusawa announced a campaign for the U.S. Senate in Virginia against Democratic incumbent Mark Warner; his campaign said it would focus on national security and supporting citizens.⁠[1]

In the Republican primary on August 4, 2026, he defeated David E. Williams and Kim Farington to win the nomination; the Associated Press called the race at 7:29 p.m.⁠[3][4]

He said that, if elected, he hoped to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee and was also interested in the Judiciary Committee.⁠[4]

Mizusawa said that, if elected, he would focus on reducing federal spending and tackling the debt; he supports returning the country to a commodity-based monetary system such as the gold standard and has said BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry is better than gold. Of his candidacy he said, “I don’t really want to run for Senate, I want to be in the Senate.”⁠[5]

In the general election on November 3, 2026, Mizusawa lost to Mark Warner, who was seeking a fourth term; the Associated Press called the race for Warner that evening.⁠[6]

Besides West Point, Mizusawa earned a law degree from HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a master’s in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College, and was a Harvard MacArthur Fellow in International Security.⁠[3][1]

He has served as deputy undersecretary of the Army, as a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and as a senior adviser to the director of the CIA. An attorney, he founded the company Paxcentric and heads a McLean-based consulting and technology firm.⁠[4][3][1]

He and his wife, Amy, live in McLean, Virginia.⁠[3][2]

Personal website: https://bertforsenate.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]