That could be. Part of the issue may be that I'm trying to divide the South in the "traditional" sense; i.e., between an Upper and Deep South. In that case, placing VA is difficult since the culture of its cities and the coastal plain is quite a bit distinct from the rest of the "interior South." This is true even from a historical sense, since the people who settled around DC, Tidewater, and so on, are a distinct group from who ended up settling (later) in places like TN. However, that VA group is of the same people who settled MD, and I think you see a lot of this today in the culture around the Chesapeake, which I wrote at length above about.
If one was to divide the South longitudinally, then perhaps it would make sense to have a "coastal South" and "Inner South," in which case, you would put Hampton Roads, Richmond and places like the Outer Banks together with Charleston, and arguably Savannah. Maybe this region would end somewhere around Jacksonville.
I like the distinction between the "Inner" and "Coastal" south and am going to refine it a little bit. I think the high Appalachian plateau is pretty distinct from both the Deep South and the Coastal South, and I wouldn't say that any (except for maybe way on the south side around Galax, Danville, etc.) of Virginia is really part of what we'd call the "Deep South". I agree with whoever said that there's a difference between the Northern Neck/Hampton Roads/Richmond areas and the Shenandoah/Blacksburg-Christianburg/Panhandle area. These areas are very distinct from each other. The coastal area is agrarian, more urbanization and has more African American influence whereas the Appalachian areas of Virginia are more resource-extraction based (Shenandoah is iffy) and heavily Scots-Irish. The issues there people care about are very different. Someone from the panhandle/coalfields area is more similar to someone from West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky or Eastern Tennessee than they are to somebody from the Chesapeake, South Carolina or Alabama.
