JOE BIDEN AND Kamala Harris have been named as Time’s Person of the Year for 2020.

The magazine cover boasts portraits of the president-elect and vice president-elect with the subtitle “Changing America’s story”.

Time’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal says Biden and Harris won the honour for “changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world”.

“Every elected President since [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] has at some point during his term been a Person of the Year, nearly a dozen of those in a presidential election year. This is the first time we have included a vice president.”

“Together, they offered restoration and renewal in a single ticket. And America bought what they were selling,” the publication added.

Time also praised the Democratic ticket for ousting an incumbent president for the just the 10th time in US history.

“Biden and Harris had to revive the party’s fading strength with white voters without college degrees; energise its emerging base of diverse, urban young voters; and motivate the hordes of angry suburbanites, particularly college graduates and women, who had fled the Trump-era GOP,” it wrote.

Time’s other Person of the Year candidates were President Donald Trump; frontline health care workers and Dr Anthony Fauci; and the movement for racial justice.

The magazine’s award – handed out annually since 1927 - honours the person or people who most impacted the news, for better or worse, during the calendar year.

When asked by Time what he would like people to say about him after four years in the White House, Biden replied: “That America was better off and average Americans are better off the day we left than the day we arrived. That’s my objective.”

Harris is the first vice president-elect to be named Person of the Year.

She said in an interview with Time that Biden’s administration would have to tackle a host of issues from the White House, including the pandemic, an “economic crisis” and a “long overdue reckoning on racial justice.”

“We have to be able to multitask, just like any parent or any human being does,” Harris said.

Essential workers on the frontline against the Covid-19  pandemic, including doctors, nurses and grocery store employees, had topped a readers’ poll of who should be named Person of the Year. 

Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg was Time’s Person of the Year last year, while Trump won in 2016.

© AFP 2020