ST. LOUIS (AP) — U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat in a decidedly Republican state, is seizing on an issue that she believes resonates in even the most conservative corners of the state — the financial future of the lowest wage earners.

The two-term incumbent campaigned Thursday in St. Louis, where she celebrated the resounding defeat of a so-called right-to-work measure earlier this month and touted the value of raising the minimum wage.

An Aug. 7 ballot proposition to make Missouri a right-to-work state, which would have banned mandatory union fees, was defeated by a 2-to-1 margin. The November ballot includes a measure to gradually raise the state’s $7.85 minimum wage to $12 an hour.

“We have an opportunity in November to raise the minimum wage in Missouri and I am 100 percent in favor of that,” McCaskill said. She said it would be a “shot in the arm” for the state’s minimum wage workers, including about 100,000 parents.

“This is a real important economic driver for our communities. When minimum wage goes up, other wages go up slightly and you have more money in the economy and that actually helps create jobs,” McCaskill said.

Her Republican opponent, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, also campaigned in the St. Louis area Thursday as part of a tour to taunt McCaskill for failing to agree to a series of debates.

Hawley said he was undecided on the November ballot issue but that a higher minimum wage “is probably a good idea.” But he said federal lawmakers need to do more than that to help working families.

“I think workers deserve a raise in this country. Probably not just workers at the minimum, but every worker in the country, particularly those who make beneath the median wage,” Hawley said.

Republicans view McCaskill’s seat as vulnerable in their bid to keep control of the Senate, and if the minimum wage issue provides any boost at all for McCaskill, she’ll take it. Missouri was for decades a swing state, but it has moved strongly to the right in recent elections. McCaskill and state Auditor Nicole Galloway are the only Democrats holding statewide office and President Donald Trump carried Missouri by 19 percentage points in 2016.

As she campaigns, McCaskill often points out her bipartisan efforts and portrays herself as a centrist. She is not among the Senate Democrats who are outspokenly critical of Trump.

Supporting a higher minimum wage carries little political risk because Missouri, while conservative outside the urban areas, is also working-class, said St. Louis University political scientist Ken Warren.

“Missouri has consistently opposed right-to-work, and raising the minimum wage is something Missourians have supported as well,” Warren said. “It’s a pro-working, persons-type of measure.”

“It’s not a radical issue,” Warren said. “Most reasonable people realize you can’t make it on 7-something an hour.”

Whether or not the presence of the ballot measure will help McCaskill in November is uncertain. In 2014, Arkansas voters overwhelmingly passed a minimum wage initiative, but Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor was still defeated by Republican Tom Cotton.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A new report says the Kansas agency in charge of child welfare failed to meet more than half of 30 performance standards last year.

The Department for Children and Families this week said a report tracking the performance measures found the agency didn’t meet 16 federal and state standards.

The report covered from July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2018 and used the agency’s data. Among other things, the report found children had 8.9 homes for every 1,000 days they were in foster care – more than double the standard of 4.12 homes.

Department spokeswoman Taylor Forrest said the agency has implemented several efforts to improve performance and meet federal outcome measures.

Child welfare advocates say the report shows the depth of problems at the department.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Thursday appointed a local school board president and a former technical college president to the state’s once-embattled K-12 education board, bringing it close to fully staffed.

Seven of eight seats on the State Board of Education now are filled, a step forward after a standoff between former Gov. Eric Greitens and lawmakers left the board without enough members to meet for months earlier this year. Parson has appointed four board members since Greitens resigned amid scandal in June, allowing the panel to resume work.

The latest appointees are Raymore resident Kim Bailey, a Republican, and Linn resident Don Claycomb, an independent.

Bailey is president of the Raymore Peculiar School Board and an adjunct professor in the counseling department at Calvary University, a Christian school. She has also led a local homeschooling organization. Claycomb retired as president of the State Technical College of Missouri in 2016.

Both appointees need state Senate confirmation, and a vote could come soon. A top senator wrote in an email to colleagues Thursday that an expected special session in September will include work reviewing gubernatorial appointees.

Parson also on Thursday named two farm friendly members to the Clean Water Commission, the state board that oversees water pollution. Parson reappointed Pat Thomas and named Allen Rowland to the commission.

Thomas is the chief of staff for farmer and Republican state Sen. Brian Munzlinger, as well as a secretary of the Missouri Republican Party State Committee. Rowland is a retired farmer and previously served on the Missouri Farm Bureau’s board of directors.

Parson on Thursday picked former GOP state Sen. Gary Nodler of Joplin and Urban League of Greater Kansas City President and CEO Gwendolyn Grant for the state Coordinating Board for Higher Education.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has told Congress he is canceling a pay raise that most civilian federal employees were due to receive in January, citing budgetary constraints.

Trump informed House and Senate leaders in a letter sent Thursday.

Trump says in the letter that locality pay increases would cost $25 billion, on top of a 2.1 percent across-the-board increase for most civilian government employees.

He cites the costs and says: “We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.” Trump says he’s determined that for 2019 “both across-the-board pay increases and locality pay increases will be set at zero.”

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A 70-year-old woman has been charged with letting one dog starve to death while boarding it and keeping four other dogs in cramped cages with no food or water.

70-year-old Charlotte Kerr, of Columbia, was charged Wednesday with four counts of felony animal abuse and a single count of misdemeanor animal abuse. Her attorney declined to comment.

Animal control officers wrote in charging documents that Kerr watched the 2-year-old Gordon setter for about 14 days before it died of what veterinarians determined was starvation. The documents say Kerr told officers that another dead dog was in her basement and she hadn’t been down there for two days.

Officers found the feces-covered dog barely alive, along with three other dogs with no food or water.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Sprint’s chief executive says the wireless company is considering selling its 4 million-square-foot suburban Kansas City campus as federal regulators weigh a proposed merger with T-Mobile.

Sprint CEO Michel Combes said Wednesday in an email to employees that the company is evaluating potential buyers for its Overland Park, Kansas, campus in a deal that would allow the company to lease back the buildings it needs for its employees.

Under the proposed merger with T-Mobile, the Sprint campus would become the combined company’s secondary headquarters.

Sprint currently has 6,000 full-time employees at the campus, fewer than half the number the campus was designed to accommodate. As Sprint’s headcount has dropped, it has subleased space and more recently announced that it would consider selling unused buildings.

LEE’S SUMMIT, Mo. (AP) — A former suburban Kansas City police officer has been charged with robbing a bank and leading police on a chase.

Thirty-five-year-old Richard Hagerty was charged Wednesday in federal court with one count of bank robbery and one count possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. His attorney hasn’t returned a phone call seeking comment.

An FBI agent wrote in the affidavit that the former Lee’s Summit police officer stole $7,000 Wednesday from a bank in the city. Witnesses said he pointed a handgun at a customer and ordered people to “get down” before demanding cash from two tellers.

The ensuing police pursuit ended in the nearby city of Grandview. Officers recognized Hagerty when he got out of the vehicle. He worked for the Lee’s Summit Police Department until 2016.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A University of Missouri spokesman on Wednesday said a Missouri Democratic Party email seeking interns ended up in the inboxes of most faculty, staff and students at the Columbia campus, and that someone then used the email addresses for a phishing attempt.

Christian Basi, the university spokesman, said the email slipped through the school’s spam filters and most people on the campus received at least one copy of it Monday. He said the party obtained two or three email address lists that enabled the email to spread as far as it did. The Columbia campus had an opening-day fall enrollment of nearly 30,000 students.

Party spokeswoman Brooke Goren in a statement said the email was sent widespread inadvertently.

“One of the coordinated staffers was reaching out to folks from a publicly available student directory they found online and they didn’t realize one address was a listserve,” Goren said. “It wasn’t anything intentional, they were just trying to get more students involved.”

Basi said the university did not provide an email list to Democrats, but that it is publicly available for $150 per campus and has been sold previously.

Once the mass email went out, Basi said a student’s email was hacked and the addresses from the Democrats’ email were used in a phishing attempt.

“We think what they did is they stripped out all of the actual information that was in the original email, put in another kind of a phish scam and realized that they could send it to the entire campus, and hit send,” Basi said.

To further complicate things, Basi said people who responded to the phishing scam inadvertently messaged the entire address list in a “reply all” email chain.

Basi said the snafu doesn’t appear to have caused significant issues, but outgoing emails were stalled for about 90 minutes Tuesday to root out problem messages.