I *MAY* ramble about this a lot someday, and I may or may not have a lot I want to say about the subject, but one of the fundamental problems of the Deeds campaign was that they spent way too much time trying to make him into Mark Warner 2.0. Which, although Ben may disagree, doomed them from the start.
I do, naturally. The Deeds campaign had a lot of issues, but trying to be Mark Warner wasn't one of them. If anything, they didn't do a good enough job of following Mark Warner's path to victory in 2001. Warner was able to hold on to NOVA, while at the same time keeping much of Southwest Virginia. If Deeds had been able to appeal to moderates the way Warner did, and stay positive while doing so, he would have done significantly better.