Boston College Associate Professor of Political Science David Hopkins and co-author Matt Grossmann have been honored with the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association for Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. The award recognizes a book published in the last two years that made an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties. Hopkins’ newest book is Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which examines the partisan divide in American politics. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties’ geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters’ partisan preferences, as magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections – with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government.