Thank you all for your input. Vinny, I implemented your idea and my TOC looks perfect now. Thank you!

The document was created in indesign, so no issues could be due to importing text. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the character that is last in the line. Some of the lines end in a close parenthesis, but not all of them are unevenly spaced. Same with lines that end in specific letters – like if the line ends with an “s”, some are spaced ok, others not. I tried to copy/paste a working line and the space still showed up. It appears that the spacing of the leader aligns at the right, but leaves extra space at the left after the letters because all of the leader characters need to be evenly spaced.