Which poli sci PhD programs in the US should I be applying to?

[Pierre Ng]

I am a PRC national (male, cisgender, heterosexual, ethnically Chinese, first-gen college student) with a Bachelor's in IR from one of the top 2 universities in China and currently in my second year towards a Master's in IR at the same uni.
My substantive interests are broadly situated in IR and IPE.
I am interested in studying political methodology as a second major/minor subfield but I am not confident about my quant skills cuz I didn't take any math courses in college except for "Statistics" which was unfortunately marked as "Pass" instead of a numerical grade due to COVID-19 lockdowns. 

I got a B for "Mathematical Logic" in my freshman year which is not a relevant math course but it might raise a red flag somehow. That being said, I did a lot of studying to compensate for my quant deficiency:
I did take two quant-y courses in college (Social Stats 91/100, Quant Methods in Social Sciences 96/100) and got As or higher for four graduate-level quant methods courses during the first year of my Master's studies: "Quant Reasoning", "Applied Econometrics", "Big Data Analysis" and "Computational Social Science" (for which I got an A+).  I also got certificates for some math courses on Coursera as part of my informal training. 

The greatest disadvantage that worries me most may be my super unimpressive college GPA (3.67/4.00 according to my uni's grading scale cuz I didn't take schoolwork seriously in my first two years of college). However, I excelled academically in my Master's program (3.97/4.00) but I am not sure to what excent it could offset my deficiency in college GPA.

My GRE score: V 165 (95%), Q 167 (83%), W 5.0 (91%) (I am not a native speaker of English so I also need to take TOEFL/IELTS and my previous TOEFL score is 115/120 with 28/30 for speaking.)

I have done three research assistantships up till now.

There are a few schools on my mind at the moment:
Top preferences: UCSD, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Rochester, Columbia and NYU.
Secondary preferences: WUSTL, OSU, MIT, UMich and UW-Madison.
Backup options: UNC Chapel Hill, Minnesota (Twin City) and UIUC.

I have no study abroad experiences whatsoever.

I can secure strong rec letters from my profs, one of whom is well connected with the US poli sci academia.

Basically I have been looking at programs that:

(a) match my substantive interests,

(b) have faculty members super specialized in political methodology and/or

(c) offer methodology as a major subfield that I can pivot toward once I get in.

Is there anything about my background that would put me at a serious disadvantage or am I just too ambitious in applying to schools like Stanford and Harvard?

I would appreciate any suggestions on school choices or anything that could help with PhD app at this point of time.

Edited November 1, 2023 by Pierre Ng

[MadnessPink]

I really think you should target some of the lower ranked schools. These are all top schools with extremely low acceptance rates, especially for international students applying straight from China. Better talk to your advisor about the past placement of his/her students in US PhD programs. Connections and match are the two most important factors that can affect your application results from my perspective. GPA, comparatively, not so important for international students.