Post was rewritten after additional investigation. The error message was:
Installation of this product failed because it is not supported on this operating system. For information on supported configurations, see the product documentation.
The installation target is a Hyper-V guest machine as follows: 2G RAM, 14.5 GB free on the C: drive, 2.5 GHz CPU. .NET 3.5 is turned on.
On this page https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42299 the following note was confusing to me (bold is my emphasis):
Note: Microsoft® SQL Server® 2014 Express includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. SQLEXPR32_x86 is a smaller package that can be used to install SQL Server 2014 Express onto only 32-bit operating systems. SQLEXPR_x86 is the same product but supports installation onto both 32-bit and 64-bit (WoW) operating systems. SQLEXPR_x64 is a native 64-bit SQL Server 2014 Express and supports installation onto only 64-bit operating systems. There is no other difference between these packages. Microsoft® SQL Server® 2014 Express is not supported on IA64 systems.
The wording seemed to indicate the x86.exe would work on both 32/64 bit systems which was consistent with my findings. But I thought that also indicated the 32bit.msi would also work on both 32/64 bit systems. I am beginning to believe I misunderstood and would appreciate confirmation the error is my reading of the note.
My particular problem was the misunderstanding that the 32 bit MSI would work on a 64 bit OS. Once I changed to the 64 bit MSI SQL Express 2014 loaded just fine into the VM. The 32 bit x86 .exe setup file did in fact work on the 64 bit OS, just not the MSI setup file.