Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:39 pm
Hillary Clinton may have a massive 2.7 million vote lead – and still growing – over Donald Trump in the national popular vote, but that’s not the only contest in which she is beating the president-elect handily.
In an online poll of who should be named Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’, the former Secretary of State leads Trump by a 2-1 margin, 52 percent to 26 percent. Nearly 90,000 people have cast votes in the poll.
Like the presidential election, though, Trump is likely to receive the title, despite more people choosing Clinton.
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Since the 1990s, Time has chosen newly elected presidents as ‘Person of the Year’ in every instance. Bill Clinton was given the title in 1992, Bush in 2000, and President Obama in 2008 – all after winning a first term in the White House.
According to the magazine’s editors, the award is given to “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”
With that criteria, it’s hard to see how Trump is not named ‘Person of the Year.
For a year and a half, he has dominated the new coverage and has been given more media attention than he’s deserved. He has “affected our lives” for ill with bigoted and hateful campaign rhetoric that has worsened the racial divide in our country. This is at least partly responsible for the spike in violent hate crimes against minorities.
His language and conduct throughout the campaign have not just made an impact at home, though. It has also emboldened our enemies and alienated our allies abroad.
When we think of Time’s ‘Person of the Year’, names like Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. often come to mind. But the magazine has also chosen figures like Adolph Hitler, Richard Nixon, and Newt Gingrich.
Keep that in mind if Trump is named ‘Person of the Year’ on Wednesday.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
