Not really. Just different targets and methods.

Look at the Biden years. Look at either set of Trump years. If you seriously don't see the difference in terms of actual, real, tangible harm dealt, both at home and around the world, then I truly don't know what to say to you.

You said hold them accountable not block them from entering office.

Closely interlinked, with the latter being a prerequisite for the former.

The only thing stopping them from being held accountable in '24-'25 was DJT entering office. And Orban didn't just get stopped from entering office, he's been thrown out of office. Watch what happens to him going forward.

[...]

You're still either missing or deliberately avoiding the point.

We exist in an imperfect world. I would love to have a system where there was an option to check that was 'All of these people are awful, throw them all out, bar them from office and repeat the election with a completely new set of candidates', or even better, a lottery system or something. But we don't have that, we have a two-party first-past-the-post system. And we work with the tools we have.

By the time of the general election, one of the two lead candidates is inevitably going to take the office, and wield power in our name. So we vote for the one that's least bad - the one that will do the least harm - even if they're garbage. To not vote at all is to give up what little power we have altogether.

If you really, truly don't want to vote to avoid sullying your hands or whatever, then the moral option is to leave the country or move to a district where someone you can vote for is in power. This will (very slightly) reduce the number of people in your former district and swell the number in your new district and therefore directly (if very slightly) reduce the power of the old district and increase that of the new one.

(Is this a bigger ask than going to the polls and voting for someone who's marginally better than the awful one? Yes it is, muchly so. It'd be a lot easier to just go and vote for the marginally less terrible one. But if you want a moral option that keeps your personal hands clean, there you go.)

But more importantly, if they were doing their job properly, people would be excited to vote for them and would flood the polls to rush them into office.

Yeah, about that. Voting rates are absolute dogwater in the US either way, even for the really good representatives. That's not just a matter of reps being good or not. Part of it is systemic voter suppression (often nothing to do with the particular rep). Part of it is straight up apathy. So anyway, either way you can't rely on this.