**OMG-Trump's Approval among African Americans has plummeted to 3% !!! **

[mr_lebowski]

65. MOE and Confidence Interval are largely the same thing ...

If your 'result' arrives at 50%, with plus or minus 3% MOE, that is another way of saying we have 47 - 53% confidence interval. All groups of stats, if large enough, have an average & a standard deviation, which means a confidence interval can be calculated.

One important component of both MOE and CI (and one that's typically left unstated, except maybe in the fine print) when polling results are released is the confidence LEVEL, which is typically either 90%, 95%, or 99% ... importantly, it's never stated as 100%. 95% is pretty standard so if you're not told explicitly it's NOT 95%, that's probably what is being used.

Basically the higher the confidence level, the larger the confidence interval (and MOE) have to be. So using the numbers I gave above you might see:
Using a 90% Confidence Level ... the result is 50% plus or minus 1.7% MOE (or 48.3 - 51.7% CI)
Using 95% ... the result is 50% plus or minus 3% MOE (or 47 - 53% CI)
Using 99% ... the result is 50% plus or minus 5% MOE (or 45 - 55% CI)

To put it in more plain words: "Given the results of our sampling, we can state with 99% certainty that the true value for the entire population is between 45% and 55%".