With the Democratic presidential nomination heading into its final stretches, the winner — presumably Sen. Obama — will need all the time he can get to unify his party in the face of polls showing an unusually high number of supporters of both him and Sen. Hillary Clinton as being disinclined to support the other candidate in November.

Gallup’s latest polls shows that from November to last week, Obama supporters with negative views of Clinton went from 35 to 44 percent. The number of Clinton voters with similarly negative views of Obama went from 26 to 42 percent. Pollster John Zogby said of this, “These are ... higher numbers than usual for both sides who say they will not switch.”

If history is a guide, quite a few of these will drift back to the nominee by November; however, the high numbers and the intensity of this season’s intra-party struggle will give the eventual nominee a big job to do.