How does Muffin already have net negative favorable rating?
It's common for people with low name recognition to have negative favorabilities. I think there's some fraction of poll respondents who just say "unfavorable" when they haven't heard of someone rather than "don't know". Maybe they don't want to admit to being ignorant of the person in question, and feel it's safer to say "unfavorable" in case the person they don't know is someone awful? I don't know. But we've seen similar things before with unknown presidential candidates in the primaries. E.g., O'Malley was getting #s like that early on when no one had heard of him yet.
More media exposure correlates with negative favorable rating.
I'm sorry, but that's just straight up false. Politicians with very low name recognition are usually in the red on favorability. Go back and look up the very early 2016 polls, and you'll see what I mean. E.g., in this 2012 poll of Iowa, O'Malley and Schweitzer have rock bottom name recognition, and they're both net unfavorable:
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_IA_072312.pdf
In fact, I think PPP has tested the favorability of a fictitious name before, and the person ended up with a net unfavorable rating.
The real question in my mind is this: Is one's propensity for holding negative opinions about individuals they have never heard of indicative of anything else? If you rate a fictitious name negatively, are you more likely to be conservative/Republican?
