Who is Al Gross? What to know about Alaska's Senate candidate

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Congressional Democrats are hoping to re-take the Senate and keep a majority in the House by flipping red states to blue during Tuesday's election. 

In Alaska, independent Al Gross, who is running as the Democratic nominee, hopes to defeat Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan. 

The race has drawn national attention as the parties vie for control of the Senate. The largest amount of registered voters in Alaska identify as independents, however, the state has long been considered a Republican stronghold. While the Alaska Senate race was not deemed to be originally competitive, Democrats’ hopes to knock off Republicans in additional races amid increased spending by the GOP, reports said.

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Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Al Gross, center, is shown at a campaign event at a downtown park in Juneau, Alaska, on Saturday, Oct. 31, 2020, with his wife, Monica Gross. (AP Photo/Becky Bohrer)

“There is so much on the line with this election, and we know it’s going to be very, very close,” Gross told supporters in his hometown of Juneau this week.

Gross, 58, an orthopedic surgeon, and former commercial fisherman left his full-time practice in 2013 and increasingly got involved in health care advocacy. 

Gross left Alaska to get his medical degree at the University of Washington, where he paid his way through school by catching salmon on his boat, the Ocean Pearl, and selling them to wholesalers, according to Forward.

While Gross had run on the liberal platform of expanding Medicare with a public option, raising the minimum wage, fighting climate change, implementing campaign finance reform, he considers himself an "independent thinker," the paper reported.

Gross also opposed Amy Coney Barrett's nomination, due to concerns over how she would rule on abortion and the Affordable Care Act. He also supports abortion rights and renewable energy as a way to diversify Alaska's economy but not the so-called Green New Deal.

“If you think I have any intention of turning Alaska into a park, you’re wrong,” Gross said this month. 

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During his campaign, Gross has tried to portray Sullivan as a “yes man” to President Trump, who won the state with just over 51% of the vote in 2016.

He also reportedly killed a grizzly bear in self-defense at one point in his life, after it charged at them.

“I’ve had countless encounters with both brown bears and black bears,” Gross told Forward. “It was not a good ending to an otherwise great day."

More than 150,000 voters had cast their ballots in Alaska as of early Monday, according to the Anchorage Daily News. Roughly 320,000 total votes were cast in the state during the 2016 presidential election, division statistics showed.

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Since 1980, Alaska has sent one Democrat to the Senate, Mark Begich, who narrowly lost to Sullivan in 2014 after serving one term.

The Associated Press contributed to this report