jQuery() not finding elements in jQuery.parseHTML() result

I'm writing tests with QUnit and using $.ajax() to pull in HTML for some of the tests from the the dev site running on my local:

add_elements = function(location, selector) { 
  $.ajax(location, {async: false}).done(function(data) {
    stor.$els = $(selector, $.parseHTML(data));
    stor.$els.appendTo($('body'));
  })
}

Using this function at a certain location, I get the following data passed to my .done() callback:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
    <title>Home</title>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <link href="/static/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen">

</head>

<body>
<div id="app-container" class="container-fluid">
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>
            <a href="/">Home</a>
            <small>Text</small>
        </h1>
    </div>

    <div id="hero-units" class="carousel-inner slide">

        <div class="hero-unit home item active">
            <h1>
                Text text text
            </h1>
            <p>
                More text!
            </p>
            <div id="app-nav">
                <a id="lets-go" class="btn btn-primary btn-large nav-forward" href="/what-up/">
                    Let's go
                </a>
            </div>
        </div>

    </div>
</div>

<script src="/static/js/jquery.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/underscore.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/backbone.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/bootstrap.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/site-fiddle.js"></script>
<script src="/static/js/site.js"></script>

</body>
</html>

Everything works