It’s easy to see why Mitt Romney has had enough, the Editorial Board writes. It’s time for Utah voters to step up.

Nothing in Mitt Romney’s long political career became him like the leaving of it.

Romney’s announcement Wednesday that he was stepping aside after a single term in the U.S. Senate says a lot about Utah’s best-known and — outside the radical right wing of his own party — most admired politician. Much of it good.

And it says a lot about the state of politics in America today. A lot of it bad.

What happens next will be up to the voters of Utah.

Those voters will not only have a choice denied them for decades — to select a new senator in an open contest — but the responsibility to watch out that the state’s political class does not try to deny them full participation in that process.

In announcing that he would not seek re-election in 2024, Republican Romney noted that he would be well into his 80s at the end of another six-year Senate term. He said that his Baby Boom generation had had its chance and it was now time for a new generation of leaders to step up. A generation that will have to live with the consequences of the decisions that will now be made.