LONGMONT, Colo. -- Dale Klotz's business repairing power tools took a nosedive when foreclosure signs sprouted up on lawns across the northern suburbs of Denver.

He's looking for a second job, and he wishes he wasn't saddled with a mortgage. But amid the hard times, he took some satisfaction Tuesday in the House's vote to turn down President Bush's $700 billion rescue package for the financial system.

"I don't think we ought to bail out Wall Street," Klotz, 45, said as he loaded groceries into his white Ford pickup at a shopping center. "I'm an average American, trying to make a living."

Why, he asked, should his tax dollars go to save reckless Wall Street executives?

Similar sentiments fueled this week's rebellion in the House, where members bucked party leaders and the Bush administration to block approval of the rescue package.

Election-year politics also played a role, analysts say. Klotz's representative, Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., is locked in a tight re-election battle and said she heeded the views of her constituents in voting against the bailout Monday.

"It's not a moment at which people can put the national interest ahead of constituent interest," said Bob Loevy, a political science professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

According to one count, 30 of the 38 representatives in the most competitive House races in the Nov. 4 election voted against the bill. Americans have bombarded members of Congress with calls and e-mails urging no votes, causing some computers on Capitol Hill to crash over the past two days.

Groups such as ACORN, the national advocacy group for low-wage workers, organized rallies outside of Federal Reserve offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major cities.

"You look at an electoral battleground map and you are looking at Nevada, the foreclosure capital of the country, and Michigan and Ohio and Florida," said Austin King, director of an ACORN center in New Orleans. "These swing states have tens or hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. Voters there want to see something done that helps them, not just Wall Street."

Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., said she voted against the bailout after her office was swamped over the weekend with more than 1,000 calls on the bailout, with just two of those in support.

But Tuesday, after attending a funeral in Los Angeles, Watson said she was besieged by people demanding to know what she was going to do to get the economy back on track.

"These are teachers, nurses, regular working people, and they're worried about their 401(k)s, their jobs, the whole economy because they don't understand how this is all going to work," Watson said.

Watson's urban district bears little resemblance to Musgrave's district, which wraps around the eastern half of Colorado, dotted with ranches and tiny agricultural settlements.

Most of its population, however, is in the exurbs at the northern edge of the Denver metropolitan area. Some of those cities featured high rates of foreclosure before last year's housing bust kicked rates even higher elsewhere.

A former school teacher and small-business owner who was first elected to Congress in 2002, Musgrave is a staunch social and fiscal conservative who narrowly won re-election in 2006. She is considered one of the most vulnerable incumbent House members this year.

Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster, said the district is populated by people inherently unsympathetic to the proposed bailout.

"Fiscal conservatives, small government, anti-government ideologues," Ciruli said. Musgrave "has both a good sprinkling of those individuals in her district and she has a personal philosophy like that."

Even district residents with starkly different political views were unenthusiastic about the bailout.

"If people who were being rescued are like you and me, working hard every day and struggling to make ends meet that's one thing," said Roni Lavine, 61, a Longmont meeting planner who wore a Barack Obama pin on her purse. "People are really angry that they're losing their homes, and they see these corporate executives walking out with millions of dollars."

Still, some were unnerved at the package's failure and eager for some action.

"There's a perception out there it just relates to a bunch of people in New York, on Wall Street," said Mike Preigh, a 42-year-old chemist. "But it all flows downhill. ... Doing nothing is probably worse than doing something that's not great."

Musgrave announced her opposition to the bailout Sept. 23, the day Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson formally presented the plan to Congress.

Her spokesman, Joe Brettell, said Musgrave has not been moved by politics but by the people she represented. "The congresswoman looks at her district first, and she really feels she made the right decision," he said.

On Tuesday, Musgrave said she was not concerned about the huge stock selloff that followed the rejection of the bailout plan Monday.

"We don't answer to Wall Street," she said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "We answer to Main Street. We answer to our constituents."

Later Tuesday, however, Musgrave was huddled in meetings as negotiators worked to craft revised legislation expected to go to a vote Wednesday in the Senate and the House on Thursday. "It is important," she said in a statement, "for people around the country to know that we are actively working toward a solution to this problem."

Riccardi reported from Colorado and Heisel from California.