Twerk may have been dealt a crushing blow when Oxford Dictionaries recently announced that the word of the year was “Selfie,” but the former Disney starlet who forever ingrained the regrettable term in the cultural zeitgeist could have the last laugh.
With only two days to go, pop princess Miley Cyrus is leading the polling for TIME’s Person of the Year. As of Monday, Cyrus had 20.2 percent of the vote, followed by Egyptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with 18.6 percent, and Turkish Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan with 18.3 percent (no Edward Snowden?). Last year's victor was President Barack Obama.
In addition to voting through their website, TIME partnered with Twitter to open up the reader’s choice poll to social media, with users tweeting their choice(s) with #TIMEPOY—which the publication is then recording.
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On Tuesday, Cyrus beckoned her 15.8 million+ Twitter followers to vote for her for TIME’s Person of the Year with the following tweets:
According to TIME, Cyrus received 95.3 percent of her votes via Twitter—the most of any candidate.
Let’s take a look at Cyrus’s POY credentials.
Yahoo! recently confirmed that “Miley Cyrus” was the most searched term on the site in 2013 (followed by Kim Kardashian). She attracted the ire of a nation of pearl-clutching Puritans when she stuck out her tongue and twerked on singer Robin Thicke during a performance on MTV’s VMAs, which “spurred a massive wave of 306,100 tweets per minute,” reported Forbes, the second most ever to last year’s election night, which led to 327,452 tweets per minute. Her recent album, Bangerz, opened at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the Terry Richardson-shot music video for her breakup anthem “Wrecking Ball,” depicting a scantily clad Cyrus literally swinging from a wrecking ball, became a viral sensation, notching over 200 million YouTube views in its first month, and 377 million total (and counting). It also inspired one of the funniest parody videos of the year.
Perhaps, as far as the pop culture sphere is concerned, 2013 really has been the year of Miley.
