CMV: r/Conservative posts are getting pushed to the front page with little engagement

Posted this in r/nostupidquestions originally, but it was removed for being a rant, so hopefully I can get an answer here. So, like some others have also noted, I’ve been getting more posts from the conservative subreddit pushed to my popular page, and I noticed that there’s a big discrepancy between the upvotes on the post itself versus the top level comments.

Here's what I mean:

Political and current event posts usually get a LOT of engagement, a post that has ~4000 upvotes usually has a top comment with upvotes between 800 to 2400, but the r/conservative posts that are getting around 4k votes have top comments around 200.

Why such a huge difference? Are people really scrolling through Reddit, upvoting the post but not reading or voting on any of the comments?

On top of that, the comments are weird too. I know it’s a heavily moderated subreddit, but the comment count versus the amount of comments you can actually see is an order of magnitude in difference, and when you click on the collapsed replies most of them have nothing there. Don’t removed comments show as deleted?

I realize that I might just be ignorant of how Reddit works, and I’m not trying to make this a political post. I’m genuinely looking for an answer here, and thanks in advance.

Some examples from the last couple days:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/qsDslLhVXP

4.4k upvotes with the top comment at 189 upvotes, and 29 comments showing versus 278 comments counted, at time of posting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/NukDmHg2Kf

4k upvotes with the top comment at 221 upvotes, and 19 comments showing versus 262 comments counted, at time of posting.