WASHINGTON – The potential of a government shutdown at the end of the month loomed slightly larger Wednesday after a critical measure to fund the government through mid-November was defeated in the House Wednesday evening.

GOP leaders were unable to overcome objections from Democrats who believed the bill did not do enough for disaster victims and from conservative Republicans who wanted to use the bill to cut spending more deeply.

The vote was a significant defeat for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and other GOP leaders, who had been confident they could muscle the bill over to the Senate despite protests from both sides of the aisle.

House leaders must now rewrite to appease either Democrats or the right wing of their own party and pass a bill for consideration by the Senate before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30, or the government will shut down.

The measure failed 230 to 195. Only six Democrats voted for it, while 182 Democrats voted against. More significantly, 48 Republicans opposed it.

At issue for conservative Republicans was their leadership’s decision to set spending in the bill at a rate of $1.043 trillion for the year, the spending level agreed to in the bitterly contested August deal to raise the debt ceiling.

But many Republicans considered the figure a cap and believed their party should push for deeper cuts at every turn.

“There has to be that moment where we say ‘No, this is not what is necessary, and we’re going to have to work for something better,’ ” said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who opposed the bill.

Democrats, meanwhile, opposed the bill because it offset $1.5 billion of $3.65 billion in disaster relief funding with a cut to a program that loans money to car companies to encourage the production of energy-efficient cars.

They believed the program created jobs and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, strained by repeated natural disasters, needs more funding.

Ten Republicans had joined Democrats in the Senate last week to approve a separate bill to spend $6.9 billion on disaster relief efforts over the course of the year.

Senate Democrats had been threatening to amend the continuing resolution with the additional funding if the measure had passed the House.

Rep. Mike Michaud, D-Maine, was one of the six House Democrats who voted in favor of the House GOP bill.

He said after the vote that he did so because Maine communities need at least $2.4 million for recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Irene, and he is urging congressional leaders to reach a compromise on a final bipartisan disaster relief funding bill before federal relief resources run out.

Michaud wrote a letter to House GOP leaders saying that since the House bill went down to defeat, House GOP leaders should bring up for a vote on the House floor the more generous Senate relief measure.

Michaud told the House GOP leaders that he voted for the House GOP disaster relief bill “because it contained the disaster funding that my constituents in Maine need to recover from the storm.”