“If things don’t go well" for Terry McAuliffe, one party lawmaker said, "there’s going to be a lot of different reckonings here.”.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe answers questions from reporters after casting his ballot during early voting.

Losing ground in a Virginia gubernatorial campaign once seen as a near-lock for Democrats, McAuliffe has sought to nationalize the race — calling out congressional inaction and President Joe Biden’s waning popularity as he tries to mount a return to an office he held four years ago.

McAuliffe’s allies on Capitol Hill have also ratcheted up their pressure campaign, demanding Speaker Nancy Pelosi put the Senate-passed infrastructure bill up for a vote in a move they say would help him ahead of the Nov.

If McAuliffe doesn’t pull out a win, some pessimistic Democrats privately predicted a “collapse” on Capitol Hill, where party leaders are already struggling to unite sparring progressives and centrists around a roughly $2 trillion social infrastructure package.

That bill is stalled out because Pelosi and other senior Democrats have yet to clinch a deal on the social spending bill with two key holdouts, centrist Sens.

Democrats control both of the state’s legislative chambers, as well as every statewide elected office, but Bob McDonnell’s resounding gubernatorial win in 2009 demonstrated how hard national momentum swung away from Democrats as they tried to clinch the Affordable Care Act.

But a few tried to paint a rosier picture of the too-close-for-comfort Virginia race — that either way, it should be an alarm bell for Democrats to unite behind a once-in-a-generation bill that could touch every aspect of American life, from child and family programs to health care to the environment.

Don Beyer (D-Va.), who lost a gubernatorial race in Virginia in 1997.

Mark Warner (D-Va.), a former governor, said that like Biden, “Terry’s all about action and delivering,” but that gridlock on Capitol Hill while Democrats control both Congress and the White House undercuts the party’s message that it knows how to govern.

“The single best thing that can happen for Terry is either get the infrastructure bill or” a China competitiveness bill, both of which passed the Senate earlier this year but have stalled in the House, Warner said in an interview.

Progressives who’ve been major proponents of balancing a big party-line social safety net bill with the infrastructure package said they’d take that deal in order to send the latter, bipartisan bill to Biden's desk in the days before the Virginia race

But Pelosi has dismissed the idea that McAuliffe’s race factors into her timing for a vote on the infrastructure bill