Back in 2003 when former first lady of California Sharon Davis found out that her husband Gray was facing a gubernatorial recall election, she said it was like, “finding out that you have cancer.”

Davis went on to further explain to the Los Angeles Times, “It’s terrible news, and you think, ‘My gosh, what am I going to do?’ Very few people say, ‘I’m going to go home and die. What I’m going to do is fight it.’”

Fast forward to this year. Hillary Clinton’s election night “victory party” at the Javits Convention Center in New York was described by U.S. News and World Report as a “mourning site.” And one guest at Clinton’s holiday party at the Plaza Hotel, also in the Big Apple, told the New York Post that the event was “like a wake with a band.”

In keeping with the death theme, after a political party loses an election, top party strategists and donors usually demand that a proverbial “autopsy” be performed so that everybody knows what went wrong and they theoretically don’t repeat the same mistakes in future elections.

But that may not happen this time around. Why? Top Democrats say it’s not their fault.

Democrats seem to think that they ran a great campaign with a fantastic candidate but had the election stolen from them thanks to Russian interference, FBI Director James Comey and the proliferation of “fake news.”

While speaking to a group of donors earlier this month, Clinton took direct aim at Vladimir Putin and the Russians. “Make no mistake, as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to them during the last months of the campaign … This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation,” she said.

She also deflected blame of her loss onto James Comey and the FBI, stating, “Swing-state voters made their decisions in the final days breaking against me because of the FBI letter from Director Comey.”

And then in a speech at the retirement ceremony for outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Clinton theorized that people didn’t like her because they couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction while reading their Facebook feed. “It’s now clear that so-called fake news can have real world consequences. This isn’t about politics or partisanship. Lives are at risk,” she theorized.

Rank and file Democrats appear to be buying into this narrative.

Nothing says owning your loss like blaming The Onion.

I can just picture the opening benediction at the next DNC meeting. “Dear Lord, please give us the strength to blame those who did this to us and accuse those who didn’t.”

Amen.

There’s only one problem with this theory, Hillary Clinton isn’t the only Democrat who got clobbered this cycle.

Take the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin, for example. In that race, freshman incumbent U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a conservative Republican, was up against former Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat. Wisconsin is a purple state, that leans blue, and has no business re-electing an unapologetic right-wing senator in a presidential year.

But they did.

The same thing happened to U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey in the blueish state of Pennsylvania.

Nationally, the Democrats are now down to controlling only 11 governor’s mansions, they’ve lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives, they’ve lost control of the U.S. Senate and get this, at the state level they’ve lost approximately 900 legislative seats over the last six years.

Their problem isn’t fake news, it’s fake excuses.

John Phillips is a CNN political commentator and can be heard weekdays at 3 p.m. on “The Drive Home with Jillian Barberie and John Phillips” on KABC/AM 790.