Preliminarily: For better or worse, !memes doesn’t exclude politics, and it has been that way since before I even created my Lemmy user account. As far as I’m concerned, the comm is what it is. It’s been here since Lemmy’s inception, and !nonpolitical_memes was created three years later (also before my time).
I believe that people who upvote it do it not because they laughed, but because they agree with the political message. And I don’t think memes should be like that.
I agree with you that many people (up/down) vote on political memes not for the quality of the meme but for agreement in the politics. I was on Reddit for over 15 years and made the same observation as you. I, too, am not a fan of low quality memes bubbling to the top on account of their political message, and I personally don’t upvote them. One could try to argue that this behavior is a Reddit holdover, but I suspect that it’s human nature. Just look at how low-quality political cartoons often are in newspapers.
If someone wants to create a political meme community (of whatever political stripe), where the mods aggressively remove low quality memes, they certainly can, and I wish them the best of luck.
I understand that you don’t like the politics of !memes, and I do sympathize with your frustration with the low-quality memes. We can’t police people’s voting motivations, so—unfortunately for you and me—the low-quality memes are not going away. The politics reflect the community, and if the politics don’t reflect you, then it might not be your community. Just block/unsubscribe and move on.