Shifting allegiance.

In 1884 a delegation of Protestant ministers gathered in New York City in a show of support for the Republican presidential nominee, James G. Blaine. In one of the notable campaign gaffes of American politics, the group's spokesman, the Reverend Samuel Burchard, warmed up the partisan assembly by denouncing the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion."

This remark infuriated enough Catholic voters to give Grover Cleveland a winning margin of 1,100 in New York, sending him to the White House. In an election postmortem, Republican Blaine himself said, "I should have carried New York by 10,000 if the weather had been clear on election day and Mr. Burchard had been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or Cochin China."

In fact, Burchard's remark may have been indiscreet, but it was not inaccurate. The South, the Catholics, and the saloons (in New York, at least) were bulwarks of the Democratic party in 1884 and long thereafter.

But no longer.

Mr. Burchard would have been astonished at the election of 1994 and the composition of the next Congress. The Romans (Catholics) and the Rebels (Southerners) will constitute half of its Republican membership. (Though the purveyors of rum are currently concerned with avoiding added sin taxes, we have no idea how they fared.) 1994 signals a revolutionary shift in the base of support for the two parties; groups that were once overwhelmingly Democrat are deserting in droves and changing the composition of the Republican party.

That Republicanism is spreading through the South like kudzu is not news. No Democratic presidential candidate has gained a majority of the Southern vote since 1976, when Jimmy Carter won; none has had a majority of white Southerners since 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was elected. Now Southern voters, who expressed their dissatisfaction with national Democrats by voting for the Republican presidential candidate, have turned to Republicans for Congress as well as state and local offices. As Democratic incumbents retire, this Republican tide can be expected to roll on through the South.

In 1994, eleven states once part of the Confederacy elected sixty-four Republicans and sixty-one Democrats to the House. Five of the six senatorial contests in these states were won by Republicans, and with the switch in party affiliation of Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, this adds up to thirteen Republican and nine Democratic Southern senators in the new Congress. Governors of six of these eleven states will be Republicans. Things have changed even in New York, Burchard's home state: Of fourteen Republicans elected to represent the state in the House, ten are Catholics (there are seven Catholics among New York's seventeen Democratic House members).

Not since 1946 when Republicans took 56 House seats from the Democrats to win control of the 80th Congress has there been an upheaval like that of 1994, though the geographical and religious mix of the 104th Congress will be quite different. In 1946 the South sent no Republicans to the Senate and only two to the House--less than 1 percent of the total Republican membership (246). This year, Southerners will constitute 28 percent of the Republican membership in the House and 25 percent in the Senate. The top Republicans in the House--the speaker, the majority leader, and majority whip--are all Southerners.

In the past thirty years, the base of Republican strength has shifted south and west. In the 90th Congress, which opened in 1967, two-thirds of Republican House members represented Eastern and Midwestern states; today only 45 percent do. In 1967, 12 percent of House Republicans came from the eleven states of the old Confederacy; today that percentage has more than doubled. Throw in Kentucky and Oklahoma and the region's share of Republican House seats approaches one-third of the total; in combination with the Western states, they constitute a clear majority of Republican House members.

REPUBLICAN CATHOLIC MEMBERSHIP IN CONGRESS

         80th Cong.   86th Cong.   90th Cong.   104th Cong.
         (1947--48)   (1959--60)   (1967--68)   (1995--96)
Senate        1            0            2            9
House        13           14           22           54

Nor is the Republican congressional membership any longer overwhelmingly Protestant. Catholic Republicans have steadily increased over the last half-century, growing from 4 percent in the 80th Congress to the current 22 percent in the 104th.

As they long have on the Democratic side of the aisle, Catholic Republicans will substantially outnumber the adherents of any other single religious group in the new House. Among Republican senators, nine Catholics run a close second to ten Episcopalians.

The serious erosion of Catholic support for the Democrats has been discernible at least since 1972 when McGovernites took control of the party. Jimmy Carter, in the post-Watergate election of 1976, was the last Democratic presidential candidate to receive a majority of the Catholic vote. This trend is not found among black Catholics, who remain as strongly attached to the Democratic party as do other African-Americans. Except for Cuban-Americans, Hispanics still give the Democrats a comfortable margin of the vote, about two to one.

Among "white" Catholics, however, most polls show either an equal split between the parties or a Republican advantage. A 1994 Times-Mirror poll reported that 47 percent of the white Catholic population regards itself as Republican or leaning Republican and 46 percent are Democratic or leaning Democratic. A 1990 survey of religious identity by City University of New York found that 34 percent of non-Hispanic white Catholics were Republican and 29 percent Democratic. These latter findings are consistent with a Times-Mirror poll on the 1994 congressional race: nationwide 54 percent of white Catholics voted for Republican House candidates.

In New York City, where Catholics once voted the straight Democratic ticket by margins of two-to-one, the 1993 mayoral election pointed in the direction of mass abandonment. Rudolph Giuliani received 86 percent of the white Catholic vote; David Dinkins, 12 percent. In the same year, the Republican candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, was the choice of 78 percent of white Catholics; the Democrat, Michael Woo, polled 22 percent. Examples abound in 1994 gubernatorial races: for one, in a three-way race, George Patacki of New York received 52 percent of the vote cast by Catholics, 10 percentage points more than Mario Cuomo.

The Democrats are in danger of losing permanently important parts of a coalition that often carried them to victory. But Republicans would be wrong to assume that recently acquired supporters--particularly Catholics with a large percentage of swing voters--are permanently committed. It is doubtful that Ross Perot's 20-percent share of the Catholic vote in 1992 has become strongly anchored to the Republican party.

One hundred years ago the voters replaced a Democratic majority in Congress by Republicans in a tidal wave. The election of 1894 was the prelude to an era of Republican dominance in American politics. Whether the election of 1994 is a harbinger of the same remains to be seen. Much will depend on the performance of the 104th Congress.