I don't know if the Democrat vote was depressed in Virginia...Gore actually didn't do that badly for a Democrat there (only lost by 8 points) and the shift toward the GOP from 1996 was less than the national average. Gore's vote may have been depressed in rural Virginia, but he did pretty well in the DC suburbs (just as he did in most other suburbs of large cities). In Connecticut, another factor was that Lieberman was on the Dem ticket as Gore's running mate.
It wasn't depressed as bad as in WV, but in district 9(a Democrat stronghold) Gore did terribly only winning 3 counties and a city.
A better preformance in the 9th could have carried the state.
But in the long run Virgina is swinging back towards the Dems anyway 
Even with a better performance in VA 9, Gore would have still lost the state. Bush won the rest of VA by 194,265 votes, and only 214,379 votes were cast in VA 9. In other words, keeping everything else the same, Gore would have had to have won 91% in VA 9 to win the state.
No Dem will win VA in a 50-50 election, but in a election with a margin of victory like Clinton's, targeting VA may be worthwhile. Rural VA is, if anything, tilting Republican, but Northern VA has shifted to the Dems.
