Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock

When I attempted to connect to a local MySQL server during my test suite, it fails with the error: OperationalError: (2002, "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)") However, I'm able to at all times, connect to MySQL by running the command line ``mysql`` program. A ``ps aux | grep mysql`` shows the server is running, and ``stat /tmp/mysql.sock`` confirm that the socket exists. Further, if I open a debugger in ``except`` clause of that exception, I'm able to reliably connect with the exact same parameters. This issue reproduces fairly reliably, however it doesn't appear to be 100%, because every once in a blue moon, my test suite does in fact run without hitting this error. When I attempted to run with ``sudo dtruss`` it did not reproduce. All the client code is in Python, though I can't figure how that'd be relevant. Switching to use host ``127.0.0.1`` produces the error: DatabaseError: Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (61)