As you say and as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), most political stories are off topic. But most != all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 (Dec 2012)

The question is where to draw the line, but it's clear the line can't be "no political stories at all". We tried that as an experiment once and what we learned is that (1) nobody can agree about what counts as a 'political' story; (2) introducing that question just leads to even more politicization of the site; and (3) there exist stories that are clearly on topic for HN and yet have political overlap.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 (Dec 2016)

So what we settled on was a slightly-better-articulated version of the status quo ante, which is: some (but not most) stories with political overlap are ok on HN; the question "which ones specifically are ok?" is generally answered by: the ones that have some intellectual interest that isn't just partisan, plus significant-enough new information so that the discussion doesn't automatically turn completely repetitive.

Here's a link to many past explanations of this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) read some of those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Finally, people should understand that this question hasn't just come up recently—it goes back as far as the site itself. Lots of examples here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018)