"I'm not doing this for naught," Palin said last week, when asked if all the mudslinging in the campaign made her long for a return to the more sedate politics of Alaska, where she is governor.

Palin, who is also an ex-beauty queen, moose hunter and mother of five, rose from obscurity after being picked to join McCain's ticket, and ignited the Republican conservative base with a star turn at the party's convention at the end of August.

After's McCain stinging loss, Palin, 44, has emerged as one of the strongest brands the Republicans have got.

As one of the most recognisable figures in a party searching for direction and new leadership, Palin's future role will be a major theme when Republican heavyweights weigh up strategies for the 2010 mid-term congressional elections.

"She definitely is going to be the most popular Republican in this country when this thing is over," Republican strategist Ed Rollins, and former political director to president Ronald Reagan, told CNN before the election.

"She'll basically spend the next three of four years, running around doing Lincoln Day dinners and raising money for people."

Polls found Palin to be a drag on the Republican ticket amid fears she was too inexperienced to be the nation's second in command. She has been the target of almost daily attacks and ridicule amid a string of gaffes and scandals.

Interviews in which she gave Alaska's proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy experience, and suggested, wrongly, that the vice president was in charge of the US Senate set alarm bells ringing.

Even Republican aides in the weeks leading up to the general election rounded on her as a "diva" and "whack job."

But the carefully coiffed conservative Christian who cast herself as a maverick, a reformer and an anti-corruption star, has clearly indicated the 2008 run wasn't an end-all to her national political ambitions.

"I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we've taken, that would bring this whole" endeavour to nothing, Palin told ABC last week.

In the last pre-election episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, comedienne Tina Fey, in her much lauded role impersonating Palin, made a show of "going rogue" from the McCain campaign talking points by trying to hawk "Palin 2012" t-shirts.

At Republican rallies in recent weeks supporters too have been seen displaying "Palin 2012" shirts and banners.

In a survey by Newsweek magazine Palin has jumped to the front of the field of 2012 hopefuls, leap-frogging most of the 2008 Republican nomination contenders to hold 20 per cent support for a White House run in four years, polling only behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (35 per cent) and former Arkansas governor (26 per cent).

Palin, once dubbed "America's Hottest Governor," earned approval ratings of 80 per cent in Alaska. She has led the vast, oil-producing north-western state since December 2006, when she became the youngest person ever to hold Alaska's governorship.

Now she has become only the second woman ever to run - and lose - on a major-party White House ticket, after Democrat Geraldine Ferraro who ran to be VP in 1984.

Born on February 11, 1964 in Idaho, Palin grew up in the town of Wasilla, Alaska - population 8,500 - when her family moved there.

She studied journalism at the University of Idaho and worked in Anchorage as a television sports reporter before moving into politics.

She returned to Wasilla in 1992 to serve on the city council and later successfully challenged the incumbent-mayor and held office from 1996-2002.

Palin has a son, Track, in the US army who deployed to Iraq on September 11, and daughters Bristol, 18, Willow, 14, and Piper, seven. She has also a young son, Trig, with Down Syndrome, who was born in April.

Her husband Todd, 43, is a former commercial fisherman who now works in Alaska's oil fields and who is a champion snowmobile racer, a four-time winner of the Alaska Iron Dog competition. Alaskans have dubbed him "The First Dude."

AFP