To me it is obviously George Floyd.
OK who is in second place? Nominations:
Dr. Fauci
Joe Biden
Mitt Romney
General Mattis
At this point? Dr. Fauci.
Otherwise, BLM as a whole, but the The Protester was named in 2011. I think George Floyd would be a strange choice because he did not choose his role.
Other candidates:
Person(s) who discover a cure/vaccine for Coronavirus.
Someone we don’t even know about, because it’s been that kind of year. 
Dr. Fauci.
Andrew Cuomo.
I love me some Andy-man!!!
I think they go with the healthcare worker or the essential worker. COVID is still a much bigger story than the Floyd protests/riots and is a better way to describe 2020. The protests have been large this time around, I wonder how much of the that is due to quarantine and no one having vacation or other summer plans.
This makes the most sense to me.
But I’d love it if were Dr. Fauci just to see the top of trump’s head fly off and his thumbs catch on fire. 
Just a note, we still have nearly 7 months to go in 2020, and the way this year has gone so far, I won’t be anointing anyone just quite yet…
To answer the OP: Yes, there apparently is a debate.
Essential workers for sure. Everything from health care, the guy at 7-11 and truck drivers.
Or maybe it should be a generic ‘Supply Line’. Without which we would all be pretty much screwed. I’d be eating squirrels.
SARS-CoV-2.
They’ve picked nonhuman winners before: “the computer” in 1982, and “the endangered Earth” in 1988.
Well, sure. Don’t get out the oil yet. But here at the Dope we specialize in idle speculation.
Whoever saves us from the asteroid that is heading for us in November.
Other than that, in an election year it’s most likely who wins the election.
Trump. It should have been Trump 5 years running. Nobody has impacted the news more than he has, and the only reason he won’t get it is because that idiot would assume it was an honor of some kind.
It was him in 2016. It will be him if he wins in 2020. It will be Biden if he wins. Both stories write themselves and would easily incorporate all the big events from the year.
I would put my money on “the health care worker”. The symbolism should be such as to make clear that both doctors and nurses were being honored.
I’m quite serious about the coronavirus. Unless a major war breaks out, it’s hard to see how anything will have had a bigger impact on this godforsaken year than the damned virus. And that includes all the people who played roles in our response - Fauci, essential workers, health care workers, Trump, Cuomo, whoever.
Yeah, Time could wimp out and pick one of those, like they did in 2001 when they went with Giuliani rather than Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 terrorists themselves. That pick certainly hasn’t aged well, which should help discourage them making the wrong pick this time. But I doubt there’d be the same emotional resistance to picking SARS-CoV-2 this year than there was to picking bin Laden in 2001.
It was “YOU” in 2006, with a very crude mirror on the cover.
Perhaps Fauci. Too early to tell. George Floyd would have to be as a symbol, he might be part of it.
The hypothetical person who first contracted SARS-CoV-2. I’d say they have had one of the most pronounced effects on the world in a long, long time.
This was my first thought when I saw the thread title. Time has picked non-humans before, and I see no reason why they should not this year. Between quarantine lockdowns, economies crashing, unemployment rising, deaths, shortages of such things as toilet paper, and so on, and so on, no single person, or group of people, has affected the world this year as much as a tiny, microscopic virus. If Time has selected non-humans before, I see no reason why it should not this time around.