What are you afraid of?

Answers to that question aren’t hard to come by: spiders, heights, the dark; perhaps a shrinking bank account balance?

Our fears can, like a river, run wide, deep and strong. They can sweep us up and carry us far and fast, frequently to places from which we hardly recognize on the way back.

More and more this political season, they seem to be doing just that — with plenty of help from candidates and groups trying to woo voters in the run-up to this November’s presidential election. Political advertising is forecast to hit a record $11.4 billion this year, 20 percent more than the comparable election in 2012. Adding in what already has been spent on the campaign in 2015, that total rises to $16.5 billion.

In 2015, the campaign’s ad war managed to avoid the record-setting negativity of 2012’s presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney — when three-quarters of 3 million ads costing nearly $2 billion appealed to anger.

So far in 2016? Not so much. Negative ads bombarded Iowa caucus voters; the candidates savaged each other in New Hampshire; and by mid-February, the amount of negative advertising jumped from less than 20 percent to more than 40 percent, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks and analyzes every broadcast ad aired by every federal and state election candidate in the country.

The shame of this tactic — and the long-term trend toward candidates and political groups plying voter fear and anger — is that it also has real, long-term consequences for the electorate. You can only whip people into a fearful and angry frenzy for so long before it stops being an election year parlor trick and starts being an everday reality.

The Washington Post polled registered voters last November and found that 83 percent believed a terrorist attack in the U.S. is likely.

Earlier this year, a survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors nationwide found that churches are twice as likely to fear immigrant refugees as they are to help them.

There’s no better example of reactionary fear and anger than the results of a December survey performed by Public Policy Polling. The organization asked primary voters a simple question: “Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?” Thirty percent of Republican primary voters and 19 percent of Democrats said they would, according to the firm.

There’s just one hitch: Agrabah hasn’t done anything to deserve a bombing. It’s a fictional city in Disney’s classic cartoon movie “Aladdin.” So unless substantial percentages of voters from both major political parties have traumatizing memories of the production’s musical numbers, there’s only one explanation for why they want to see Agrabah razed: its name sounds Muslim.

Dalia Mogahed, the director of research at the Washington-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, said that it’s not terrorist attacks that produce the worst of these spikes in reactionary thinking. It’s contested political seasons.

That is being reinforced every day by reports filed from the campaign trail. Candidates from both parties use hate and fear — whether it’s aimed at foreign countries and their people, or the other candidate — to rally support and attention. And they do it because it works.

That’s an ominous sign, but there’s still time to find our way back from empowering politicians who exploit our fears and anger. That river hasn’t carried us out of sight of land just yet.