With eight months left until the November election, the semiofficial list of candidates for mayor of San Francisco looks something like this: a city attorney, a state senator, three former supervisors, the tax assessor and a Silicon Valley businesswoman.

That does not include three current supervisors — David Chiu, Ross Mirkarimi and David Campos — who have been testing the waters. Nor does it include the names from past elections one hears whispered, wistfully, in dark corners of Chris Daly’s Market Street dive.

With generous public campaign financing, the ranked-choice voting system being used in the mayoral race for the first time and no clear front-runner, the race seems to have half the city over legal voting age considering a run.

The only person publicly ruling himself out is the man who has been in City Hall’s Room 200 for a month: interim Mayor Edwin M. Lee.

In a recent visit to The Bay Citizen, Lee promised, if gingerly, that he would step down after this year.

“I actually enjoy the speculation,” he said with a chuckle when asked about his plans. “That’s another way to confirm whether or not I’m doing good things.”

Lee said several supervisors had voted for his appointment on the condition that he would not run. He would like to restore “the trust that used to be in mayors past,” Lee said.

After he spoke about the city’s political climate, he was asked again if he would unequivocally rule out a run.

“That’s right,” he said.

Part of Lee’s quandary is that while he genuinely does not seem interested in running, there is already a growing chorus calling for his name on the ballot.

The frenzy began a week after Lee’s inauguration, when a Chronicle columnist suggested, “Lee may be the interim, but don’t kid yourself.”

Rose Pak, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce power broker who played a key role in putting Lee in office, has been openly urging him to run.

And that has been an unnerving prospect for some candidates.

“Anybody thinking about getting in today is thinking, ‘I need to know if he’s running,’” said David Latterman, a political consultant.

Chiu, for one, has asked Lee several times in recent weeks whether he intended to run, according to people close to both politicians, because some of Chiu’s supporters in Chinatown would rather back Lee.

Lee has told Chiu no.

“For Ed to run, there would have to be some massive groundswell, like a write-in campaign,” Latterman said.

Several weeks ago, Chinatown elders hosted a banquet in honor of Lee’s appointment, with 99 tables of guests dining in two restaurants, one block apart, on Grant Street. The Chinese word for “nine” is a homophone for the word “longevity.”

While Chinatown leaders toasted Lee, Pak rushed to the table where State Senator Mark Leno, Chiu and Police Chief Jeff Godown were sitting and raised her own glass.

“This year plus two terms,” Pak told the table, cheerfully. “That also equals nine years.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.