Because downticket Democrats need help, and the Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Obama + Paulson trillion dollar bailout bill is going to hurt them:

The take away from this data [Times] for me is that Democrats in the Midwest and West are vulnerable and feel a need to shore up support. Any perusal of the comment threads on econoblogs show a significant percentage of posters declaring that they will vote against critters who voted "Yes". As I pointed out in the debate post a few days ago, these are mostly Independent white male voters, the kind who are supposed to provide the margin of victory in elections.

What this tells me is that the Democratic leadership is risking losing their majority in the House by forcing such an unpopular and incendiary measure to a vote 5 weeks before the election. The bill will be kept in the public eye with votes for at least another week, and it will be the single most salient issue in the final campaign push nationwide. People are very aware of the connection between the big banks and the foreclosure epidemic. ...

Simply put, when I'm going broke, I don't like the people who ripped me off to get bailed out. ...

It is more than the Republicans playing Lucy and yanking away the football from the hapless Democrats. It is that the Democratic leadership has willingly walked into a situation where cooperation means cooptation and where the populace is united in opposition to the proposed plan. They have cavalierly placed their downticket people at risk to avoid offending the Village rather than driving a real bargain (including delay of everything possible until Hank has cleaned out his desk and departed in January) that would rebound to the Dems election efforts. Oh, and actually do some good for us peons.

Yeppers.

OK, I admit I haven't done any crosstabs on the downticket races in the Midwest and West, and HR 676. Readers?