Cruz Takes Lead for First Time in Reuters National Poll

For the first time, Ted Cruz Tuesday surpassed Republican presidential rival Donald Trump nationally in the weekly Reuters tracking poll — by just two points after a week of debacles ranging from the front-runner's switches on abortion to his campaign manager being charged with simple battery for allegedly grabbing a news reporter.

Here are the results of the poll:

• Cruz: 39 percent.
• Trump: 37 percent.
• John Kasich: 23 percent.

The New York billionaire has regularly cited the Reuters tracking poll in speeches and television interviews.

Meanwhile, Cruz has pulled into a statistical dead heat with Trump, a different Reuters/Ipsos national poll showed on Tuesday, as the Texas senator appeared poised to pick up a key victory in Wisconsin's primary.

Cruz received 35.2 percent of support to Trump's 39.5 percent, the poll of 568 Republicans taken April 1-5 found. The numbers put the two within the poll's 4.8 percentage-point credibility interval, a measure of accuracy. Cruz and Trump were also briefly in a dead heat on March 28.

The U.S. senator from Texas was running ahead of Trump in Wisconsin according to opinion polls as voters in the state went to the polls on Tuesday. Cruz hopes a win in Wisconsin would show he can unite disparate factions of the party and break Trump's momentum.

Trump has led almost continually in national Reuters/Ipsos polling since last July. Ohio Governor John Kasich, the only other Republican still in the race for the party's nomination, placed third in Tuesday's Reuters/Ipsos poll, with 18.7 percent.

Facing possible defeat in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Trump proposed blocking money transfers to Mexico by undocumented immigrants as a way to pressure Mexico to pay for a border wall, a key component of his controversial immigration plan, which has won votes in other states.

Trump's campaign said in a memo that if elected, he would use a U.S. anti-terrorism law to cut off remittances from people living in the United States illegally. The memo elaborated on an idea Trump floated in August, when he suggested seizing all remittances tied to "illegal wages."

Asked about Trump's remittances plan, Democratic President Barack Obama called it unworkable. "The notion that we're going to track every Western Union bit of money that's being sent to Mexico, good luck with that,” Obama said at a White House press briefing.