In learning more about the 1968 election, I stumbled upon this fascinating situation Nixon found himself in going into the fall. Basically, as per the polls, the election was Nixon's to lose. The DNC was a disaster for Humphrey. The violence in the streets combined with Humphrey securing the nomination through backroom finagling from Johnson to form a very bad outlook for the Democrats going into the general election. Humphrey was torn between repudiating the status quo in Vietnam, thereby losing all the machine support and Johnson men, and maintaining it, which would cost him the support of former McCarthy/Kennedy "new politics" acolytes. Plus he had no money, and Nixon was rolling in it. Early polls were breaking in the vicinity of Nixon 43/Humphrey 31/Wallace 19.
Yet Wallace had put Nixon in a weird spot. Wallace had virtually locked up the Deep South. But it was unlikely he was going to be able to take any states outside the MI-LA-GA-AL-AR corridor, with the exception of South Carolina. Wallace's role in other states, therefore, would be spoiler. And he was fairly popular in certain areas. The reason for Nixon's dilemma was that Wallace was popular with different types of people, depending on the area. For instance, in the South -- Texas, Tennessee, Florida, the Carolinas, Kansas -- Wallace's pro-segregationist stance attracted Republican voters. Yet in the industrial belt -- places like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin -- Wallace's demagoguery attracted union workers, or Humphrey's base. And Nixon's campaign men were banking on many who were picking Wallace in the polls to be persuadable, and to gravitate back to their original preferences.
So if Nixon treated Wallace like shit and dismissed his candidacy entirely, thereby invigorating his supporters, this might be positive in the North, but bad in the South. And while Nixon might want to move to the right of Wallace in a place like South Carolina, this strategy wouldn't necessarily fly in Pennsylvania. R.N. had to thread a needle, and find out a way to maintain Wallace's support in the North (so as to offset Humphrey's vote) while chipping away at it in the lower states.
