Political stories are not off-topic on HN as such. On-topic stories are ones that gratify intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and plenty of those have political overlap. However, for a story to be on topic for HN, it needs to be intellectually interesting and capable of supporting a substantive thread. Many political stories tend to be sensational rather than intellectually interesting, and also tend to be extremely repetitive. Those are some of the qualities that make a submission off topic for HN (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...)

There are many past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.

If anyone still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is, and if you know a better way for HN to relate to political topics while fulfilling its mandate of curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'd really like to know what it is. Just please familiarize yourself with the past material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.