What shifted in the Talarico case is not the technology but the institutional source. The Irish presidential race saw AI misinformation videos removed by platforms [2]; India's election cycle drew warnings about deepfake vulnerability at democratic scale [1]. In both cases, the assumed architecture was bad actors operating at the margins. The NRSC video dismantles that assumption entirely — a named Senate campaign committee produced, published, and stood behind a synthetic media asset. That move forecloses the argument that deepfake regulation only…