The genuinely inspiring India Walton mayoral campaign deservedly got the lion’s share of attention leading up to and following last week’s elections. Her loss last week came as a shock. But this intense focus has obscured the significant gains socialist and socialist-allied candidates made that day in other cities. In all, twenty-three of the thirty-three candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that were on the ballot on Tuesday won their elections.

Maybe the biggest wins came in the Massachusetts city of Somerville, where four of Boston DSA’s seven-person-strong slate for city council won, with Charlotte Kelly and Willie Burnley Jr winning two at-large elections and J. T. Scott and Ben Ewen-Campen securing reelection. It falls short of DSA’s ambition to make it the country’s first socialist-majority city but puts the city in a better position to deal with its affordable housing crisis.

The victory of these self-described “sidewalk socialists” builds on a wave that began in 2017, when Our Revolution, the organization formed from the ashes of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, ran five candidates for the council and endorsed four incumbents, with all nine winning. That included Scott and Ewen-Campen, Boston DSA members at the time. Socialists took it home elsewhere in Massachusetts, too, with Kendra Hicks winning her campaign for Boston City Council, and Quinton Zondervan winning reelection to the Cambridge City Council.