He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida where he focuses on the United States elections.
[2] Upon completing his postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-MIT Data Center, McDonald accepted an assistant professor position at Vanderbilt University in 1999.
He stayed there for one year before transferring to the University of Illinois Springfield's department of political science.
[4][5] Based on this analysis, Altman, McDonald and Gill developed methods to detect issues in social science statistical models and provide more replicable and reliable estimates.
[4] McDonald continued to collaborate with Altman throughout his career and in 2011, they founded the Public Mapping Project, which developed DistrictBuilder, an open-source software redistricting application designed to provide online mapping tools.