Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia had a fragile, defiant hold on power Sunday as he and a quickly eroding coalition of allies rebuffed demands for his resignation after the revelation of a racist photograph on his medical school yearbook page.

Northam’s hopes for political survival, Democratic and Republicans officials increasingly believe, are a mounting humiliation for the state, and risk his fellow Democrats’ policy ambitions and their aspirations for crucial state elections this year, when all 140 legislative seats will be at stake.

“The question now is: Can you lead? Can you help us heal?” said Rep. A. Donald McEachin, D-Va., said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Given the actions that he’s demonstrated over the past 48 hours, the answer’s clearly no.”

Northam has offered shifting accounts — first, a Friday night apology “for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo,” which shows one person dressed in blackface and another as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, followed Saturday by professed certainty that neither person in the photograph was him. His stance, and refusal to step down amid a torrent of pressure from his party, has fueled a crisis in Virginia that has rippled into national politics.

“I tell the truth. I’m telling the truth today,” Northam said Saturday at the Executive Mansion in Richmond, where he denied a role in the yearbook photograph but acknowledged that he had darkened his face with shoe polish for a Michael Jackson costume at a dance contest in 1984.

But elected officials and strategists in both parties said they believed Northam was too far compromised to remain in office, his authority and power undercut gravely by his efforts to contain the fallout from the picture, which appeared on his page in the 1984 yearbook at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

On Sunday morning, Northam worshipped at First Baptist Church Capeville on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, which he has long attended.

Northam asserted Saturday that he had never seen the racist photograph until its disclosure online Friday, in part because he had not purchased a yearbook. The photograph’s presence on his page, he surmised, was a mistake on someone else’s part.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.