Brad Carson of Oklahoma is an exceptionally promising 37-year-old Democratic congressman who has been retired from public life (temporarily, I’d wager) after losing to Tom Coburn in the race for the Senate seat vacated by Don Nickles. Carson’s defeat, despite (1) his personal attractiveness, (2) the fact that he ran well to the right of his party, and (3) did so against a man who will be seen as one of the Senate’s more extreme conservatives, hasn’t been properly appreciated. It shows how dramatically the national Democratic “brand” needs to be retooled if Democrats are to become competitive in the South.

As Carson told me the other day, a Democrat running for Senate in a presidential year starts in a serious hole in Oklahoma, given that the state went for George Bush over John Kerry by a stunning 66 percent to 34 percent.

Yet it’s not as if being a Democrat in Oklahoma is actually fatal. Oklahoma’s governor is a Democrat. So is the Oklahoma attorney general. The state treasurer is a Democrat, as is the state auditor. The state senate is controlled by Democrats as well.

So if it’s not Loathing of Democrats per se that explains the lopsided presidential count and Carson’s loss, what’s going on? The answer seems to be Loathing of National Democrats.

Some context. Tom Coburn is a physician who supported Alan Keyes (no kidding) in the 2000 GOP presidential primary. He feels “the gay agenda” is taking over the country, and argued that his race against former Rhodes Scholar Carson was a showdown between “good and evil.” Carson, for his part, strongly supported the war in Iraq and broke with his party to endorse much of the Bush tax cut agenda. He’s for a ban on partial birth abortion (though not for overturning Roe v. Wade).

In other words, in a conservative state, Carson sounded about as Republican as you can sound while still being a Democrat. Carson ran 7 percent ahead of John Kerry and held Coburn 13 points below President Bush. Yet in Oklahoma, that still left Coburn winning easily, 53-41-6. (The 6 percent went to an oddball Naderite candidate who peeled off the “pox on both their houses” vote in a nasty campaign).

What lessons does Carson draw from his race?

The first is that, unlike statewide races, a U.S. Senate race “becomes an intensely partisan affair,” based not on the ideas or the personalities of the candidates but on “which team you’re on.” The GOP message was simple: A vote for Brad Carson is a vote for Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton – and against George Bush.

Carson assumed this approach would appeal mainly to elites, but it turned out to be “an extraordinarily powerful argument” for the broader public. (It wouldn’t be relevant in any eventual Carson gubernatorial campaign, perhaps in 2010).

The other big lesson, of course, involves the power of the religious right, and how social issues can cut across party affiliations. The church, Carson says, is the only authentic grassroots organization in much of his state. “Vote righteously” was the refrain from many pulpits, with some ministers even arguing that “voting for Kerry and Carson is a sin.”

Carson says Democrats need to understand the motivations of churchgoers who respond to such appeals. These folks are not being duped by the right to vote against their economic self-interest, as many liberals condescendingly imagine. “They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones,” Carson wrote in The New Republic after his loss. “They reject the general direction of American culture,” along with a party that “uncritically embraces modernity.” Joe Lieberman, please answer your page.

Carson isn’t hopeful that Democrats will change these dynamics soon. Only a handful of people (mainly presidential candidates) have a megaphone big enough to alter the way the national party is viewed. Everyone else, from Senate candidates on down, works within a framework of public perceptions they can’t transcend or alter, Carson says.

The Carson race “should be one of the most troubling for the national Democratic party,” says Jon Cowan, president of Third Way, a newly launched Senate-focused progressive advocacy group that hopes to help revitalize the party. “You had an outstanding candidate – smart, thoughtful, telegenic, rooted in the values of his state, who ran to the right, was well-financed, had a weak opponent, and was unable to win – because the D’ next to his name had such a negative brand attached to it that he couldn’t overcome it.”

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist.