President Barack Obama Is TIME's Person of the Year

"He's basically the beneficiary and the author of a kind of a New America, a new demographic, a new cultural America that he is now the symbol of," Stengel said.

Obama became the first Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win two consecutive re-elections with at least 50 percent of the vote, despite the highest unemployment rate in seven decades.

Stengel said Obama won support from a core group of voters who "actually don't care about politics" and felt the president ignored partisanship to do his job.

"Using the coalition of the ascendant young voters, millennials, Hispanic minorities, he's creating a new alignment, a kind of realignment like Ronald Reagan did 40 years ago," he said.

This is Obama's second time on the cover with the iconic title. He also secured the title the last time he won election -- in 2008, just after he became the first African American elected president.

The magazine's short list for this year's Person of the Year cover was revealed on TODAY, and tens of thousands of TODAY.com readers voted among the eight candidates. In addition to President Obama, they included Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!; Mohammed Morsi, president of Egypt; Undocumented Americans; Bill and Hillary Clinton; Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani student activist who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban; Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple; and the Higgs Boson and Italian physicist Fabiola Giannati.

Yousafzai, the 15-year-old targeted by the Taliban because she championed the cause of education for girls, narrowly defeated Obama in a TODAY poll.