@neil@Gargron As much as I love regexes, simple wild-carding would do, and avoid excessive load. For example: "#*politic*" would make a lot of people very happy (not me obviously, but I bet this would be in wide use).
@alan@neil You can do this by unchecking "whole word" when adding the keyword (in your example, "politic"). It will match in the middle of other words then.