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This helped the Democratic Party, but it was a minimal return on the union dollar. With Republicans looking as if they will retain control of the House – even if with smaller numbers – and likely to retake control of the Senate in 2012, a simple increase in the number of Democrats in the minority isn’t necessarily helpful to advancing union causes. The exception is in the Senate, where only 40 senators are required to filibuster bills. Without 40 senators willing to mount a filibuster, unions would be very likely to see their previous advances rolled back – especially if a Republican were occupying the Oval Office. Therefore, they would probably be more interested in supporting a Senate candidate specifically rather than spreading money around more generally across the spectrum of Democratic candidates.

In addition, the biggest defeats for unions recently haven’t been at the federal level, but at the state and local levels where they have lost privileges, pay, benefits and been laid off:

Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, says his union is going to stop giving contributions to federal candidates and federal party committees “for an indefinite period of time.”

He says national Democrats don’t stand up against the Republicans’ anti-union offensive. “It’s orchestrated, it’s centralized, it’s very disciplined,” he says. The GOP’s central message? “Take no prisoners.”

Now, Schaitberger says, the firefighters union will direct its money and energy to the states, “where we are engaged in survival.”

To be sure, unions aren’t about to start donating or supporting more than the occasional Republican any time soon. So isn’t this just an empty threat by unions?

It depends on how closely they model their political activities after the success of the TEA Party. If they truly plan to operate independently of the Democratic Party as they claim, then it is a big deal. If candidates want union money and GOTV boots on the ground, they will likely be required to take pledges to support things like card check first. If they also run their own candidates in Democratic primaries, then they stand a good chance of reshaping almost every level of the Democratic Party in much the same way that the TEA Party has done to the Republican Party.

This couldn’t come at a worse time for Democrats who desperately need to prove their centrist credentials with a public increasingly skeptical of unions in general and public sector unions specifically. But also like the TEA Party, they will first have to show Democrats that they’re not just paper tigers. They’ll have to prove they are willing to withhold support from Democratic candidates who aren’t sufficiently loyal to union causes and that they have the electoral clout to replace them with more union-friendly representatives wherever possible.

Thus far, they haven’t been able to show this strength. They spent nearly $30 million in a failed attempt to retake the Wisconsin senate despite it being the first in the nation to adopt a collective bargaining law for public employees 52 years ago. Can unions prove themselves to be more than paper tigers? Can Democrats afford for them to spend the time, effort and money to prove they’re not?

We’ll know very quickly whether unions are serious about this or merely stomping their feet and throwing a temper tantrum before dutifully returning to the Democratic Party hoping for better results next time. If they fail to prove some measure of independence this time around, they will find themselves as taken for granted as the other disparate special interest groups which make up the Democratic Party coalition. If they succeed, then the Democratic Party may never be the same again.