Um, no. the guidelines define "on-topic" as "anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
The fact that so many people upvoted the stories means there is an overwhelming desire to talk about them.
HN doesn't run on upvotes alone, so this argument doesn't prove anything. It's a constitutional democracy, with plenty of checks and balances to try to keep the system from running overheated.
In this case the story fell squarely in the "most" of "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics"—why? because there's too little information in it to count as intellectually interesting. Indeed, if a story's entire information content fits in its title, that's a bad sign for HN suitability.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
There are a zillion posts by moderators that go into great detail why 'lots of people upvoted it' is not a criterion for something being a good fit for the site.