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There's an interesting point in there.
Most politicians are quite good at establishing a rapport with their constituents during in-person interaction. I won't link them here for the sake of brevity, but "I met ${congressman} and he wasn't the scum-sucking pile of human shit that I expected him to be" stories are incredibly common. This rapport building usually translates to public speaking as well. It's almost a universal trait in politicians.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of four cases where that's not true, and where direct person to person communication seems to result in lower favorability for the politician in question. They are in no particular order:
Looking at that list, I can't really see any obvious commonality. We have two and a half Democrats and one and a half Republicans (I'm splitting Bloomberg). We have prosecutors and businessmen. We have men and women. We have representatives from the North, South, East, and West.
Are there other politicians like this, where their mere presence seems to be anathema to their political goals? What's behind it?
Hillary is the GOAT of "How in the hell is she worse in person?!" stories around the beltway.
The further we get from 2016, the more it looks like a Trump victory was inevitable.
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None of them had really faced a truly competitive election before, except for Santorum (who racked up some genuinely impressive wins). Usually politicians have to have some baseline likeability to get to the national election stage.
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Are we sure about that? The public seemed to like him less as they got to know him, but he was supposedly genuine, friendly, and caring-seeming in person, just way outside the overton window on the public stage.
Santorum's political career is an interesting case study. Everyone forgets this, but when he was in the House he represented a district that was heavily Democratic and waged his first Senate campaign as the prototypical "compassionate conservative" who would look critically at the budget but still try to accommodate social services spending. At the very least, he always shied away from the "up by your bootstraps" mentality that characterized a lot of the Reagan right in those days. As such, he was a rising young star who had bipartisan support. His first term was relatively uneventful, and he cruised to victory in a totally unmemorable campaign that was nonetheless closer than it probably should have been. He was popular enough in PA but had no national profile. He decided to rectify this during the Bush administration by going hard in the direction of the religious right. This decision absolutely boggles the mind. Maybe things looked different in 2001 or 2002, but those guys generally don't win presidential primaries, let alone general elections. He couldn't even keep his Senate seat, losing to Bob Casey, who even back then always looked like he was about to fall asleep.
As far as him being unlikable in person is concerned — I'm from the same neck of the woods as him and I never heard that. That being said, most of his interactions around here are from the '90s, when he was "your local elected official" as opposed to after 2000, when he was "national political celebrity". Part of the reason people may view him as unlikable may be that he turned into a caricature of himself at some point and couldn't turn it off. Maybe the lone attendee of his 2016 rally during the Iowa Caucuses can shed some light on this.
It's entirely possible that this is 100% driven by genuine religious convictions.
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All the reports I have are from PSU and CMU faculty and staff. That probably has enough impact that, in hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have included him in the list.
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I can't say for sure. The people I know who have met him first-hand are all of a specific (upper middle class blue tribe) type, so there may be some cognitive bias in play.
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I'm always surprised that they're surprised. Con artists don't scam people by being so off-putting that no one would ever want to speak with them. People can know going into an interaction that they're being targeted for a confidence trick and then still get tricked by it.
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