If your definition of the two terms is identical, perhaps you should look for some subtlety that you might be missing but causes other people to differentiate.
For example, maybe there is an attitude that acknowledges political interest groups tend to be made up of constitute group(s) that share more-visible property(s) than a political goal. But wants to de-emphasize those other properties compared to the political interests of the group and raise the importance of principled policy reasoning above surface-level characteristics. I dunno... just spitballing here.
>Even throughout the 2016 election and the postmortem most news outlets focused on the "identity" of ...
Election reporting is disappointingly focused on hot takes and the horse race. Does anybody actually find utility in the focus on the stories about Little Timmy falling down a well rather than a more systematic analysis?