Colorado Gives Brown Firmer Footing : Politics: The former California governor’s surprising primary win helps place him as the anti-Establishment candidate.

Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.’s unexpected victory in Colorado’s Democratic presidential primary Tuesday appears likely to catapult the former California governor into prominence as the anti-Establishment alternative to the party’s centrist front-runners.

It also assures Brown of two key resources that he has found in short supply: money and more concentrated media attention. By winning more than 20% of the vote, he will regain his eligibility for federal matching funds, which he would have lost later this month because he had failed to get at least 10% of the vote in two consecutive primaries.

With 96% of the vote in, Brown had 30% of the vote to 28% for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and 26% for former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas. The other candidates trailed badly. Brown also took a solid second place in Utah, behind Tsongas.

“We didn’t have the party leadership, we didn’t have the $1,000 contributors, we didn’t have anybody,” Brown said at a rally in Phoenix, where he was campaigning for the Saturday caucuses. “We had one state representative and he was for me because he spent a number of years in a Jesuit college. . . . The rest was just new people coming into the process.”

Brown, who studied at a Jesuit college himself, proclaimed his campaign mantra: “This is about confronting a corrupt status quo that no longer serves the people of this country.”

A longtime champion fund-raiser for his own campaigns and the Democratic Party, Brown now refuses to accept contributions larger than $100. He contends that money has corrupted the political process and that his campaign is an effort to redeem it. The legal limit is $1,000; the federal government matches contributions of $250 or less.

“The fuel of my campaign is based on very solid ground, more solid than in any campaign I have ever run,” Brown said. “It’s based on the truth of what is happening in this country. And it’s not compromised by the contradiction of the rhetoric and the money paying for the rhetoric . . . .”

The dramatic Colorado showing greatly enhances Brown’s prospects to carry his insurgent campaign through the entire primary season, including to California on June 2. He spent considerable time in the state, where he drew large, enthusiastic crowds. He appealed to students, union members, the disaffected and environmentalists, particularly anti-nuclear activists.

Brown’s success in Colorado was significant on several fronts. It demonstrated that he could broaden his appeal beyond the small number of loyalists who propelled him into a virtual dead heat with Tsongas in the Feb. 23 Maine caucuses.

But he faces a stiffer test as the accelerating Democratic contest swings into 11 high-stakes primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday next week. Many of the states voting then are in the South or are border states. Polls indicate this is unpromising turf for Brown’s threadbare campaign. He declined to predict Tuesday where he would next strike it big.

Brown, who has expanded his pitch to a wider spectrum of the Democrats’ left-wing constituency, increasingly appears to be attracting some of the white voters who flocked to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1988 primaries. Jackson finished a strong second to Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis in Colorado four years ago.

“I am reaching for a grass-roots, trade union, Rainbow Coalition activists’ alliance,” Brown said in an interview in Phoenix. “And I believe that when we go in the industrial states--New York, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, California--that’s going to be a very powerful force.”