[bryanlarsen]

In my experience in the last few months political stories come up regularly. Most are flagged, but the ones that aren't tend to get many hundreds of votes and many hundreds of comments. So the flagging tends to act as consolidation into a small number of stories.

For instance, this one is currently on front: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43610246

If you're looking for the political comment on the smaller stories, use an alternate interface like hckrnews.com -- the discussion happens long after they've been flagged off the front page.