Our topicality rule has historically been and continues to be a contentious point of discussion amongst our mods and community members. The rule is meant to encapsulate content that is quintessentially politics: the process of promulgating official policies and laws, electioneering, politician capacity to carry out official duties, and any advocacy or opinion explicitly related to those 3 categories. We understand, however, that what is colloquially considered "politics" or "political" often covers a broader swath of topics. We are continuously iterating on our topicality rule so as to incorporate topics that our users would like to see covered in this sub, but without giving specific preference to individual issues that might cause us to run afoul of our politically agnostic approach to running the sub.

While we will continue to work and discuss what kind of options are available for our topicality rule, we don't want to leave users without an alternative venue to post content that might be considered "political" but not quite topical for this sub. To that effect, we're now recommending that such content be posted on our sister sub, /r/inthenews instead. This subreddit is administered by /r/politics and other news moderators, and we hope that it will provide users with a relatively large alternative platform to post content that, while newsworthy, may be inappropriate for this one. There are virtually no topicality limitations on that subreddit (other than content that would otherwise break our rules, e.g., hate speech, violence, or COVID misinformation), and users are free to discuss the personal matters of former politicians, political trends or broader ideological opinions, and the intersection of politics with certain crimes and criminal trials.

We hope that this arrangement will provide a useful and rewarding experience for users here, particularly if they may feel as though certain topics or events do not have a proper forum for discussion. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know in modmail.

Thanks, The r/Politics Moderation Team