No, the two parties are not “just the same”. The Republicans are a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate oligarchs. The Democrats must operate in the SYSTEM that has grown up in the wake of letting the oligarchs swallow our representative democracy whole.
To wit: the oligarchs OWN the system. It was handed to them in several key cases decided by the Supreme Court.
Buckley v Valero (1976) brought in the absurd doctrine that “money is speech”. Citizen’s United (2010) relying on Valero, finished the job. The Supreme Court handed control of our electoral process and therefore our government, over to the oligarchs and the corporate “persons” they use to rule. This is what we are up against in the United States, though the oligarchs are a global threat to democracy.
They much prefer the Republicans who are working for them directly to the Democrats who they must control through various means.
And they would be very happy with a dictatorship, provided they pick the dictator.
To test this, just look at the record of actual legislation passed. The Democrats, though timid and often thwarted, have been behind every piece of legislation that made life easier for regular people, from safety net issues to rebuilding failing infrastructure. And their tax bills always revolve around attempts to tax our aristocracy.
The Republicans have passed only two types of bills: tax cuts for that same aristocracy, and laws meant to take away existing rights for regular people or make the lives of the poor harder. Such as strangling the safety net or restricting access to medical care or increasing mandatory minimums.
This is all a matter of public record.
A representative democracy requires at least two functional parties. At this point, it only has one. The Democrats.
The plan seems to be to use extremely undemocratic means such as gerrymandering to get rid of the remaining functional Party and seize complete control.
If we want to remain a democratic republic, we must instead create at least two more functional parties that stand for that kind of democracy. Just pushing the Republicans out of existence is not enough because it still results in one party rule.
A functional Conservative party that speaks for those in alignment with that believe system but behaves appropriately when they lose is necessary to a healthy political ecosystem.
Both the left and the right complain that free and fair elections are threatened. When the right speaks of this, they are referring to election fraud, which is vanishingly rare, and often involves a mistake, for example someone trying to vote in the wrong district.
When the left speaks of this, they are talking about voter suppression in the form of long lines, laws making it illegal to provide water to potential voters standing in those lines, forbidding early and by mail voting, and other laws meant to unduly burden working class and poor voters.
They are also referring to gerrymandering. In this recent election, Michigan re-elected a Democrat as governor. They also elected a Democratic majority in their legislative branch for the first time in decades. This is after appointing a bi-partisan committee to do the redistricting. They had a genuinely free and fair election and those were the results.
Another type of vote tampering has come from allowing the algorithms of large social media platforms to skew what information potential voters see. And to allow the press to obfuscate and lie outright. Both the press and the platforms are owned by corporate oligarchs.
The tampering also comes from hostile foreign powers, such as Russia. The effect was obvious in 2016, but nothing has been done to correct the situation.
And finally, the suppression and tampering come from the billions in dark money, sanctified by the cases referenced above, that washes through the electoral process like a swarm of locusts, heavily favoring corporate stooges.
In this last midterm it was reported that the election went mostly smoothly, by which those reporting mean that there was very little election fraud by voters, that the votes were counted as required by law and certified, and that armed thugs were nowhere successful in disrupting the process or intimidating most voters.
In this extremely suppressed environment, the Democrats eked out a narrow victory overall. Imagine what would happen if our elections were truly free and fair.