When it comes to the POTUS race, and Michigan's U. S. Senate seat, there is effectively no third option.  It's the "R" ticket or the "D" ticket, and every vote not cast for the "R" effectively aids the "D" . . . directly or indirectly.

I was on the dais, monitoring the teller's table, as the votes were being reported in from the districts.  As the last districts brought their tapes up, I had a brief "rear stairwell" conversation with Judge Markey and her campaign manager.  Evidently, she'd already been approached by someone advising for the O'Brien campaign about doing the "statesmanlike thing" and ceding the nomination.  Jane's question was what I thought of the option.

As unpleasant as it was for me to do so, I admitted to her that, with a majority of the districts already in, the odds at that point didn't look good.  However, in my opinion, whether she should cede or require Candice Miller (convention chair) to publish the vote totals was not a decisions that we should make until we knew the final margin.  We agreed on a cutoff based on our whip report from earlier in the week (which had Jane down by a mere single-digit margin, and needing barely more than half of the undecided bloc to win); above that cutoff, Jane would cede the nomination, below it, she'd compel the vote totals to be published.

The final margin was 17%.

"Sore loser" is perhaps a matter of perspective.  O'Brien's campaign went negative and dirty three weeks out from the convention, which Markey's campaign saw as an admission by Judge Wonderbread and her crew that the trial court judge couldn't win a clean fight.  That the mudslinging and dirty politics continued right up until the night before the convention was viewed as evidence that this race was not an inevitable as O'Brien's consultants wanted to make it look.