Then explain something for me. If her support is so narrow, why has the GOP and MSM spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to prove it?
That is a completely asinine thing for people to do. Why marginalize an already unsupported and widely disliked/unelectable person?
Answer that logically.
Because they can marginalized a whole party by identifying them with an unpopular person; that's the obvious answer. Seems pretty simple, just like how we tried to get Howard Dean nominated in 2004.
I'm not really sure about you're question, but her bad press is because the media don't like her. Not only do they not like her, they hate the people she represents. Same reason as so many other conservatives or traditional people get chewed up and spit out by the MSM. They consider Palin a laughing stock, a rural country bumpkin, and she will always be a target for them.
Look, it isn't fair, but that's what she'd have to overcome to be a serious presidential candidate. A media that is out to ridicule and destroy her. It's not just her, lots of conservatives face the same thing. Palin gets it worse in some cases because she's a woman - and we all know the left hates conservatives that they believe should be "victims".
Saying that does not make her a viable general election candidate. She just didn't make the kind of choices that seem to lead to that possibility. Palin had a golden opportunity to run in 2012 and opted out, probably because she is smart enough to know she couldn't win.