I was eight at the time (1968) living in Miami but all the people I knew voted for Wallace.
A lot of support for Wallace in FL, who launched his political career with the ‘schoolhouse door’ speech in June of 1963 which was very much a ‘staged event’.
Wallace wasn’t going to reignite the Civil War and JFK was worried because MLK and the “Civil Rights Movement” were forcing him to commit to Civil Rights alienating white Democrats in the South. JFK would end up having the FBI spying on King and making the audio ‘sex tapes’.
Wallace found new issues to talk about instead of ‘segregation forever’, like violence on the streets and the liberal media and the lack of military decisiveness in Vietnam (his running mate retired AF Chief of Staff General Curtis Lemay).
The Democrat machine twisted labor union members arms in the North, the radical protesting anti-war commie fascists showed up to disrupt Wallace appearances right before the election, limited his popular vote to around 13-14 percent when the polls had shown him as high as 21 percent a month before.