Nebraska has 93 counties. Seventy-nine of them are in the 3rd congressional district. The district runs from the Iowa line west to Wyoming and covers 179,209 square kilometres, which is most of the state by area and a minority of it by population.
No other district in the country contains as many counties. South Dakota's at-large seat has 66, Kansas's 1st has 59, North Dakota's at-large has 53.
What 79 counties looks like
Adams, Antelope, Arthur, Banner, Blaine, Boone, Box Butte, Boyd, Brown, Buffalo, Burt, Cedar, Chase, Cherry, Cheyenne, Clay, Custer, Dakota, Dawes, Dawson, Deuel, Dixon, Dundy, Fillmore, Franklin, Frontier, Furnas, Gage, Garden, Garfield, Gosper, Grant, Greeley, Hall, Hamilton, Harlan, Hayes, Hitchcock, Holt, Hooker, Howard, Jefferson, Johnson, Kearney, Keith, Keya Paha, Kimball, Knox, Lincoln, Logan, Loup, McPherson, Merrick, Morrill, Nance, Nemaha, Nuckolls, Otoe, Pawnee, Perkins, Phelps, Pierce, Red Willow, Richardson, Rock, Saline, Scotts Bluff, Sheridan, Sherman, Sioux, Thayer, Thomas, Thurston, Valley, Washington, Wayne, Webster, Wheeler and York.
That list is printed in full here on purpose, and it is deliberately not printed in full on the ballot pages, where it read as padding. Here the length is the point.
The campaign arithmetic
A House term is two years. Visit every county in the 3rd exactly once across a full term and you are making roughly one county visit every nine days, for two years, without repeating a single one. Cherry County alone is 15,528 square kilometres, larger than Connecticut, with a county seat at Valentine that sits 283 kilometres from Grand Island.
Nebraska's other two districts do not work like this at all. The 2nd is essentially Douglas County and its suburbs. The 1st is Lincoln and the southeast. Both are winnable with metropolitan media buys. The 3rd is not a media market; it spans several, and none of them are cheap per voter reached because the voters are thin on the ground.
One thing the county count hides
County-dense does not mean empty. The 3rd contains Grand Island, Kearney, Hastings, North Platte, Norfolk and Scottsbluff, and roughly a quarter of its population lives in the Platte valley corridor along Interstate 80. A campaign that treats it as uniformly rural is wrong in a way that a map coloured by county area will never show, because the counties along the Platte are small and the counties in the Sandhills are enormous.
Arthur County had 434 people at the 2020 census and covers 1,860 square kilometres. Hall County had 62,895 people and covers 1,423. The smaller county holds 145 times the people, and both get one line on the list above.