OLIVE BRANCH, Miss. -- The corner table of a converted service station -- now the best restaurant in town -- is as good a place as any to tune into the wheezy gasps of the Democrats in the South.
At the Oasis Grill & Shoeshine Parlor, the former Gulf station next to the paint store, you can get an earful about what's wrong with this country and the party that gave us FDR, JFK and LBJ.
For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans control a majority of the Senate, House and governors' seats in the South. They are also gaining local offices and a few Southern state legislatures, long viewed as Democratic fiefdoms.
To learn why there is no peace for Democrats in Olive Branch, or throughout the South, listen in on a conversation with Billy Baldwin, Paul Beale and Earl Brown, who gather almost every evening to grouse and gossip at the Oasis.
To boil it down to the essentials, they believe that the party of their parents and grandparents has moved away from them to become one of welfare giveaways, high taxes, bossy bureaucrats and liberal causes that are not theirs.
"This is a middle-class area, and we see the philosophy of the Republican Party is more in touch with what the people want," said Paul Beale, who six years ago became the first Republican elected in this county in nearly 125 years.
At the time, Mr. Beale became the lone Republican on the five-member election commission in De Soto County, a quick drive from Memphis along Elvis Presley Boulevard into Mississippi's northwest corner. Now the picture is reversed: The election board comprises four Republicans and only one Democrat.
There's more. The voters in De Soto County last month elected a Republican congressman for the first time in 122 years. It was a landslide for Roger Wicker, a conservative, who succeeds Jamie L. Whitten, a Democrat who is retiring after 53 years in Congress.
For many presidential races, the South has been more Republican than Democratic. Even with two Southerners on the Democratic presidential ballot two years ago, Bill Clinton and Al Gore took, besides Mr. Clinton's native Arkansas and Mr. Gore's native Tennessee, only two other Southern states: Georgia and Louisiana.
The 49-year-old Mr. Beale is living proof that the Republican trend is trickling down to the local political jobs that most intimately touch people's lives. That suggests that last month's sweeping Republican victories in statewide races in the South were more than a throw-out-the-bums blip to be undone in the next few elections.
With its Southern surge, "the Republican Party is now, for the first time in its existence, a truly national party on all levels," said Earl Black, a specialist in Southern politics at Rice University. "You thought the Republicans were energized this year. Wait till '96, and Clinton's on the ballot."
Mr. Baldwin, a lifelong Democrat who is a judge, is up for re-election next year. He is considering doing what would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Billy Baldwin, 53, after almost 20 years in office, is thinking of turning Republican.
"I'm here to survive," said the judge, who also works as a roofer and assistant county coroner. "Being a Democrat now is a cuss word."
"It used to be a 'solid South' for the Democrats," said Mr. Brown, a 60-year-old stockbroker. "Now, it's about solid Republican."
"I would say 95 percent of the state was 'yellow dog Democrats' until the last 20 years or so," Mr. Brown said, referring to the days when it was said that Southerners would vote for a yellow dog if he had Democrat next to his name.
"I don't know if there are many yellow dog Democrats left any more," said retiring Democratic Rep. Roy Rowland of Georgia. His successor is the first Republican to represent his district since Reconstruction.
Among the factors in what Mr. Rowland calls "the Republican tide" is the effect of congressional redistricting aimed at enhancing black representation.
By creating predominantly black districts, reapportionment has increased black congressional representation, but "it has eviscerated white Democratic politicians in the South," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.