“I see dead people.” One of the most famous lines from any Bruce Willis film—and certainly the single best-known line in M. Night Shyamalan’s catalogue—was also a stroke of true genius. The Sixth Sense tells you the big twist up front but bets, correctly, that you won’t be paying close enough attention to realize it. Willis’s character is a specter, a figment the whole time, no matter how real he seems.

Last night was the Sixth Sense Election. We were told, up front and in no uncertain terms, that this was the “vibes election.” We were not misled—we misled ourselves. By every metric, Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump was going to be the closest presidential election since 2000. On Election Eve, Nate Silver’s team put their data through 80,000 simulations; Harris won 40,012 times.

There were momentum swings, but the polling averages showed razor-thin margins. The momentum swings were vibe swings. They seemed real—it became conventional wisdom that a joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally would cost him Pennsylvania. We all watched the movie together.

Then came the twist: The campaign we watched wasn’t real. It was a specter, a figment all along.

From the moment Joe Biden dropped out and Harris announced her candidacy through Election Day was 108 days. Harris was crowned the Democratic nominee 92 days out. This was a blink-and-you-miss-it campaign. There is no way the fundamentals of the race changed significantly. It was always the race it turned out to be.

The first thing you want to do after watching the Sixth Sense for the first time is watch it a second time. And you spend that whole second viewing seeing everything you should’ve noticed. In fact, the temptation is to convince yourself that in the back of your mind, you really did notice those things.

The Sixth Sense never lies to you. The only question is whether you take what you see at face value and don’t look more closely. And most people took it at face value: The only movie that made more money that year was Star Wars: Episode 1. Shyamalan made that rare film: a thriller that was thrilling to watch a second time. And it worked only because viewers had no reason to question what they were being shown the first time.

For a while Shyamalan’s name was synonymous with “plot twist.” Every time you watched one of his movies after the Sixth Sense, you interrogated every impression and looked for clues that he was fooling you the whole time. No one ever watched a Shyamalan movie again without wondering “what’s he up to this time?” In a way, the fun became trying to predict what the plot twist would be each time he made a new movie. It was as if the entire moviegoing public had lost its innocence. You’d still watch Shyamalan’s films, even eagerly, but you’d never trust him again.

The question after the 2024 election is who the public might blame for the discrepancy between the campaign as it was and the campaign as the country saw it. There’s no M. Night Shyamalan pulling the strings. And Harris certainly can’t be blamed for wanting to portray her campaign positively. It’s too simplistic to blame the media, because they saw what they wanted to see, too.

In fact, there’s no reason to be angry with anyone over this. The campaign was always going to end this way, just as Bruce Willis’s character was always going to be a ghost. What we just witnessed was a plot twist.

But the next time a campaign tries to feed the public vibes, it will probably work on fewer people. Reporters and political spin doctors may find a more cynical audience. The challenge for Shyamalan was to adapt to the cynicism he created in his own audience. I’m sure there will be plenty of twists in future elections. But they probably won’t be exactly like the one we just saw: a campaign that was dead the whole time.