I woke up on November 3 to a cheerful email from Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The headline exclaimed, “Tuesday’s election shows that Socialism can win anywhere!”

Wow, this longtime DSA member briefly thought, maybe I was wrong, I guess India Walton pulled it off in Buffalo and will become the first socialist mayor of a large US city in decades. Instead, the promising candidate was crushed. And despite their herculean efforts, DSA’s deep bench of candidates in super-blue Somerville, Massachusetts proved unable to win a majority on the city council, where tripping over yourself to prove your leftist bona fides is a mainstream electoral strategy.

What’s more, socialists hardly faced the toughest electoral odds in 2021. Though over twenty DSA candidates were elected or reelected, only a handful competed outside of deep-blue states, and most of those ran in liberal enclaves like Orange County, North Carolina, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. To be fair, mainstream Democrats also suffered major defeats, from losing the Virginia governor’s race to seeing the president of the New Jersey State Senate fall to a Republican neophyte whose campaign war chest barely cleared four figures.