Trying out projection to get area according to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4681737/how-to-calculate-the-area-of-a-polygon-on-the-earths-surface-using-python, the coordinates are getting translated to meters centered around lat_0 and lon_0 but the shapely area is wrong, is way too small.
Dumb area with projection and area calc, now getting reasonable answers.  Next start doing density analyses on census data within each district