Less than a week after Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring said they wore blackface as young men, Fairfax on Friday faced a second assault accusation in three days.

He is now under intense pressure to resign or face impeachment, transforming what had been a crisis for Virginia Democrats into a dilemma for the national party.

The political turmoil for Democratic leaders this weekend is unfolding at the intersection of race and gender, and risks pitting the party’s most pivotal constituencies against one another. If Democrats do not oust Fairfax, they could anger female voters. But the specter of Fairfax, 39, being pushed out while two older white men remain in office — despite blackface behavior that evoked some of the country’s most painful racist images — would deeply trouble many African-Americans.

"I think the Democratic Party would lack credibility if they followed a double standard,” said Rep. Karen Bass D-Calif., who is head of the Congressional Black Caucus. Bass said that both Northam and Fairfax should step down.

On Saturday, an adviser to Fairfax said the lieutenant governor was deeply distraught over the allegations and had no intention of resigning. Fairfax, who says he is innocent, wants an independent investigation to ensure both sides are heard and their stories assessed, said the adviser, who spoke under condition of anonymity to share private conversations. But there is no apparatus for such an inquiry in Virginia.

Almost all of Virginia’s Democratic leaders and lawmakers on Friday night called on Fairfax to resign and a legislator vowed to introduce articles of impeachment if Fairfax did not quit by Monday. The state Democratic Party, after a conference call of its steering committee Saturday morning in which there was near-unanimous support for Fairfax to resign, issued a statement saying he no longer had “their confidence or support” and should quit.