I’m surprised, and yet I’m surprised that I’m surprised.  On one hand, the party facing 77 more incumbents in the House and running against a majority might be expected to run more negative or comparative advertising.  On the other hand, the scope of the potential defeat and the lack of a defense for their performance has Democrats reaching for the mud more than the GOP, according to a study released yesterday by Wesleyan University:

As we reported last week, “claims that 2010 is the most negative election to date may be premature.  In an analysis of close to 900,000 airings from January 1 to October 5, 2010, the Wesleyan Media Project finds that the distribution of positive, negative and contrast ads is comparable to 2008 in proportion, if not in volume.”  In an update to that release, and with a focus on House and Senate races, we continue to find similar rates of negativity.  Furthermore, we find that Democrats and Republicans are airing similar proportions of negative (and positive) spots in federal races.  However, there is one crucial difference: Democrats are using personal attacks at much higher rates than Republicans and a much higher rate than Democrats in 2008. …

Table 1 shows the percentage of attack ads (ads focusing only on the opposing candidate) that are focused on candidate characteristics, issues of public policy, or a mixture of both.  (Breakdowns in this way for contrast and promotional spots are available in the downloadable excel file.)  In 2010, pro-Democratic ad sponsors focused on the personal characteristics of Republican candidates in 21% of their attack ads.  This is up from the 12% of Democratic attack ads in 2008 that were focused on personal characteristics.  Republicans have mentioned candidate characteristics in 11 percent of their attack ads this year.

In other words, Democrats and their allies have tried to bottle the magic of Aqua Buddha across the country.  Two years after Hope and Change, this provides a rather amusing — for cynics — look at the politics of populism.  It turns out that those in power don’t much care for challenges to it, and instead of offering defenses and  accountability, they just prefer to launch personal attacks instead.

This offers another look at the supposed “mob mentality” of the Tea Party, which was supposed to be the disorganized and extreme portion of the electorate.  Instead, the extremists seem to be congregating on the other side of the spectrum.  While the Tea Party has generated the most experienced slate of candidates in a generation, the Democrats and their allies have produced the most personal attacks — while personal attack ads on behalf of Republicans actually dropped by a third from 2008, from 16.82% to 10.6% this year.

Also, the GOP is much more likely to attack on policy — perhaps a sign of just how unpopular the Pelosi/Reid/Obama agenda is.  Overall, GOP ads hit policy almost 69% of the time, while only 47% of Democratic ads do so.  The trend applies in candidate ads as well, where 57% of GOP candidate campaign ads attack policy and only 35% of Democratic candidate campaign ads do the same.

If you can’t defend your record, the only option left is to throw mud at your opponent.  This time, that strategy has been as successful as Aqua Buddha and the Taliban Dan campaigns.