Time's 2020 Person Of The Year Has Just Been Announced

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have become Time magazine's 2020 person – or persons – of the year.

"Together, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris offered restoration and renewal in a single ticket," The magazine said. "And America bought what they were selling: after the highest turnout in a century, they racked up 81 million votes and counting, the most in presidential history, topping Trump by some 7 million votes and flipping five battleground states."

The magazine has been choosing the year's most influential person since 1927.

Donald Trump also won the award as president-elect in 2016. His predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush were each named person of the year twice after their election victories. Last year, the winner was climate activist Greta Thunberg.

78-year-old Biden will be the oldest person ever to assume the presidency and he is also the oldest ever to be named Person of the Year by the magazine.

Harris is the country's first female, first Black, and first South Asian vice president-elect.

"If Donald Trump was a force for disruption and division over the past four years, Biden and Harris show where the nation is heading: a blend of ethnicities, lived experiences, and worldviews that must find a way forward together if the American experiment is to survive," the magazine's Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal said.

The Person of the Year title hasn't always been an "honour". In 1938, it was given to Adolf Hitler.

Even though the magazine admired him for stealing Austria "before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world". It is the final line of its announcement that's the most chilling: "To those who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered."