McDowell Discusses His Research on Immigrants’ Partisan Preferences in PsyPost Article

October 21, 2025

PsyPost

Daniel McDowell

Political Science Department

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Federal

Political Parties

U.S. Elections

U.S. Immigration

United States

PsyPost

Daniel McDowell

A study co-authored by Daniel McDowell, Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of International Affairs, and published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science found that Americans’ support for immigration changes depending on their beliefs about how immigrants vote.

As part of the study, when told that Venezuelan and Vietnamese immigrants favored Donald Trump and the Republican Party, Republicans became more supportive of immigration, while Democrats became less supportive, effectively erasing the usual partisan gap. McDowell and his co-author, David A. Steinberg of Johns Hopkins University, concluded that perceptions of immigrants’ political preferences strongly influence immigration attitudes, beyond cultural or economic factors.

“Immigration attitudes are not immune to strategic electoral thinking and hyper-partisanship,” explains McDowell. “For many Americans, our study shows that the desirability of immigration depends not just on cultural or economic factors, but also whether voters believe migrants have the same partisan preferences that that they do.”

Read more in the PsyPost article, “How a single detail about Trump radically changes partisan views on immigration.”