One of the less remarked winners of last week’s election is negative advertising. Long a bogeyman in discussions about American politics, attack ads have had an especially rough time of it this year in a campaign season that the press has regularly described as one of the “nastiest” midterms in memory. It turns out, however, that fears that negative campaigning would turn voters off the political process were misplaced.

Quite the contrary. Voters turned out to the polls in numbers not seen at midterm since 1982. Overall, turnout increased to 40.4% of the voting-age population compared to 39.7% in 2002. That slight-seeming growth masks dramatic localized increases in states with hotly contested, negative-ad-infused races. In Virginia, for example, turnout was higher than in any midterm election in history, according to Curtis Gans of American University, as quoted by the Associated Press.

Opinion polls rarely speak well of negative ads. For example, a pre-election survey in the Cincinnati area found 78% of respondents saying they thought negative ads were “inappropriate” and that 55% thought negative ads actually hurt the candidate who tries to use them to attack his opponent, while 37% said negative ads make them not want to vote.

Yet 60% of the respondents said negative ads have the intended effect of hurting the candidates they attack. And Tuesday’s turnout figures don’t support voters’ assertions to pollsters that attack ads suppress interest in elections. In Ohio, which happened to be seat of another hot Senate race, 44.6% of voting-age residents made it to the polls, up from 38.4% in 2002.

We’d suggest that attack ads led to something of an electoral renaissance this year, spurring refreshingly unusual levels of interest in a midterm election. That’s because what usually gets tarred as negative campaigning is actually just a way for candidates to make their case about what’s at stake in an election. Negative ads are how candidates excite the base by reminding voters of what will happen if the opposing candidate wins. Attack ads also call voters’ attention to facts about a candidate that might raise questions about his fitness to serve.

For all those reasons, attack ads can be good for democracy. Feature Tuesday’s long lines at the polling places. This is more than an academic question. Just consider the tussle these columns had with Senator Feingold last week, in which the senator in a letter to the editor seemed to call for more campaign speech regulation as a way to tamp down on negative ads.

It turns out that such a strategy would undermine American democracy in more ways than one. Not only would it trammel the First Amendment, it would also, one guesses based on Tuesday’s experience, depress turnout. That would be bad for just about everyone except for the incumbents whose records would be free of scrutiny from negative ads. Which is what, at the end of the day, it is safe to conclude motivates Messrs. Feingold and McCain and their colleagues who voted for campaign speech regulation in the first place.