Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is getting jeers from progressives for declaring that transgender ideology is not a popular priority in the Midwest.

Bloomberg’s statement was made in 2019 during a relaxed interview in Bermuda, where he said:

If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.

The pro-transgender groups are angrily slamming Bloomberg. “Detractors called Bloomberg’s words in the 2019 video ‘transphobic’ and ‘appalling’ and demanded that he apologize,” according to the Washington Post.

But Bloomberg is a progressive candidate for the White House who is promising to fully implement the transgender ideology — even as he recognizes that the agenda is unpopular.

There is much evidence that the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In 2017, former President Barack Obama told National Public Radio (NPR) that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for President Donald Trump to win the presidency.

Multiple polls show that most Americans reasonably wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that people’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology.

But Bloomberg’s “guy wearing a dress” comment came as he explained why progressive politicians are losing elections:

[The public mood] around the world is against the establishment. That means Brexit, that means Trump, that means [Emmanuel] Macron getting elected, that means no government in Italy and Spain and places like that. “Throw the bums out! They haven’t delivered! They didn’t listen to us!” If you go to the middle of the country, people would say, “If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.” They care about health care, they care about education, they care about safety, and all of those kinds of things. And some of these social issues — and it’s not just the American government, the E.U. government does it as well — we’re focusing on a lot of things that have little relevance to people who are trying to live in a world that is changing because of technology and communications and things like that. And so you can understand where somebody like Trump comes from. You can understand if you take a look at the Democratic Party. They are so far left that two years ago there was nobody on their side that would take these positions, and today virtually all of the candidates for president of the Democratic Party have been so progressive — I don’t know what progressive means — but they are in a place where some of the American public is. It remains to be seen whether a majority of the electorate is. It’s a very dangerous time, [and is] pulling things back. If you think about it, global trade, it reduced worldwide poverty by 50 percent in the last two decades. If we measure global poverty by literacy and a meal in your stomach and a roof over your head, literally 50 percent. Most of the benefits went to the Third World, because when you opened [it] up looking for natural resources. But today, we are going in a different direction. And I don’t know what happens between now and the next election. But what is clear is there’s a lot of people who are disaffected. You can see on the streets of Paris even. The yellow jackets, burning things down, looting stores. They’re just unhappy, and they don’t know why.

Bloomberg’s comment reflects his technocratic rejection of woke politics — and his view that a clear-eyed business analysis may help him win swing-voters during the 2020 election.

Bloomberg’s single-minded focus is on business efficiency, regardless of other issues. For example, in the same interview, he brought up the opioid drug disaster to describe it as a problem for business recruiters:

We’ve got a very low unemployment rate. There are supposedly six million unfilled jobs. There are supposedly six million people looking for a job. Some of the estimates are that half of them have such a drug problem; they will never pass [job interviews]. I was with [then-Defense Secretary] Jim Mattis the other day, and only 25 percent of young people in America could qualify to join the military if they wanted to. They’re just not in physical shape. They can’t read. They can’t write, and the drug problem is something that is just astronomical. I think it was 72,000 Americans — I don’t how much of a drug problem you have in Bermuda — but here 72,000 Americans died in 2017 from overdoses. The New York Post had — or the Daily News — had a picture on the front page [of] a father and son: They both OD’d at the same party! It is not a good family. Craziness. And then we are going hell-bent for leather in this country to legalize marijuana — another addictive drug where we’ve never done the research to what it does to people. Now maybe, in the end, it’s going to turn out that it doesn’t hurt, but preliminary evidence shows it reduces a teenage user of marijuana’s IQ by ten points and it doesn’t come back. If that’s true, how can you keep giving them and letting them have marijuana? But there’s a whole bunch of these things where we’re sort of losing control, and it’s the workforce that suffers, and it’s very hard to find a company that’s assets don’t go down in the elevator every day. So recruiting people, and the training and the schools they’re getting is terrible. Kids, particularly minority kids, don’t get a good K through eight education so they can’t get into the better high schools and they can’t get the better colleges. And the one thing you can rest assured is, education is the key to better jobs, and that’s certainly true in Bermuda. … My charm is … I say what I believe and I do it.

The central plank of Bloomberg’s campaign is a promise to import more foreign workers for the jobs that Americans supposedly cannot accomplish. The workers sought by Bloomberg include lower-skilled farmworkers, restaurant workers, and many high-skilled, high-IQ graduates for technology jobs on both coasts.