It’s just after 5 PM on a Tuesday, and Maria Giannopoulos is stationed outside the Capitol as staffers clock out. She’s filming for her viral social-media series, in which she guesses people’s political affiliations without asking them a single political question. “Do you want to be in a TikTok?” she chirps at passersby as her fiancé/videographer trots after her with an iPhone camera.
Giannopoulos, better known as Greek Maria, is a pro at making engaging political content; she was director of marketing and digital for the 2024 Republican National Convention. She has accrued more than 37,000 followers across her Instagram and TikTok accounts—spurred largely by the success of this person-on-the-street series, which she started in March. Giannopoulos lives in the District and mostly shoots locally, but her clips are shared far beyond DC; some have racked up more than 1 million views. People across the country apparently love to decode strangers’ politics based on vibes discerned from, for instance, their favorite ice-cream flavor or their dream job.
Giannopoulos and her fiancé spend a day or two each week staking out interview subjects, always in the Capitol Hill area. Finding folks who agree to be on camera can be the hardest part. Giannopoulos estimates that for every ten people she solicits, only one is willing to be filmed. Giannopoulos says she correctly clocks almost 70 percent of participants’ affiliations. That said, she knows a lot of Republicans who work in politics, so she isn’t always talking to strangers. On the day we followed her, half of her four interviews were with people whose beliefs she was already pretty sure of—one college classmate and a friend’s boyfriend. Is that cheating? Probably. With the two she didn’t know, she got it wrong.
Some questions tend to yield better guesses than others, Giannopoulos says. “What kind of car do you drive?” is pretty foolproof. One interviewee said a Tesla. Giannopoulos asked when he bought it, and the answer was 2025. “I go, ‘Republican,’ ” she says. Surprisingly, favorite potato-chip flavors seem to be revealing. “Usually, if somebody is more conservative, they’ll say plain. People who are more liberal say, like, dill pickle or jalapeño.” Giannopoulos admits she sometimes just goes on about how a subject looks. “One guy, I guessed liberal and he was Republican,” she says. “One of the reasons is he was with a girl who had blue hair.”
While I shadowed her, Giannopoulos interviewed a blond jogger on the Mall. Giannopoulos expected her to be conservative at first glance, based on her hairstyle and pink leggings, but ultimately guessed Democrat—the woman chose to invite actor and feminist Emma Watson as the celeb guest to her imaginary dinner party. But it turned out she was just a right-leaning Harry Potter fan.
@greekmaria Meet Grace from Boston. Our interview with Grace was featured in this months issue of the @Washingtonian ♬ original sound – Greekmaria
Giannopoulos is currently working on a spinoff series in which she asks people on the street to guess the political affiliations of members of Congress based on nonpolitical topics. “There’s so much beauty in asking fun questions,” she says, “and showing that people are just people—they have a lot of commonalities.”
This article appears in the July 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
